Android 3.0 and beyond start making surprise appearances

While most of the Android-carrying world still waits on the edge of their seat for Android 2.2 (Froyo) to grace their handsets, a handful of engineers over in Mountain View are already hard at work on their next big thing: Android 3.0 (Gingerbread).

Gingerbread, it seems, is getting far enough along in its development cycle that at least one or two engineers have it up and running on their kits.

GreeneComputing, developers of the LINPACK benchmarking software for Android, were running some analytics on their app usage logs and uncovered a few little gems: in between all the Android 2.2 users (which made up 43.1%) and Android 2.1 users (which made up 39.8%), a few users appeared to be running something special: Android 3.0. Oh, and Android 3.0.1, and 3.2, for that matter.

Before you get too excited: 3.0.1 and 3.2 are likely near identical copies of 3.0 at this point, just separated out onto individual branches for the sake of developing them in parallel. Still, that means Google’s got at least one minor and one small-but-still-pretty-notable update on the drawing board already — and we can’t wait for either, much less the big 3.0 itself.

[Via DroidDog]