The Google Play Store has outed the imminent release of Jelly Bean, an upcoming Android update. When a user purchases the Galaxy Nexus from the website, the device is listed as “the latest smartphone from Google, soon the first phone with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.”
This discovery was made by an XDA forum commenter and first reported by Droid Life. It suggests the Jelly Bean update is coming soon, so it seems increasingly likely that Google will unveil the new version next week at its Google I/O conference in San Francisco.
The Android roadmap tends to be opaque, with little information about upcoming updates made available in advance. Rumors that surfaced earlier this year indicated that Jelly Bean could be launched as early as the second half of 2012 and could incorporate Google’s Chrome Web browser (currently in beta on the Android platform).
It’s not yet clear whether Jelly Bean will bring deep changes to the platform, but it’s worth noting that some previous Android point releases have introduced major technical improvements. The current version is Android 4, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, which was released in the fourth quarter of 2011 but has been slow to see adoption.
According to statistics that Google collects from its application store, only 7 percent of Android handsets in active use are running version 4. Roughly 65 percent still run version 2.3, which was released in 2010 and continued shipping on new devices that launched in the first half of this year.
In addition to Jelly Bean, another likely candidate for a Google I/O unveiling is Google’s rumored Nexus Tablet. The search giant has reportedly been working on a low-cost seven-inch tablet device that will compete with the Kindle Fire. The device popped up in online benchmarks earlier this year, apparently sporting a Tegra 3 SoC and a 1280x768 display.
