The next iteration of Google’s (News - Alert) Android mobile operating system, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich, will be released in October or November of this year, says the search engine giant’s chairman Eric Schmidt (News - Alert).

Google’s former CEO let the news slip last Friday at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco during a one-hour chat with Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff (News - Alert).

“We have a new operating system, internally known as ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ for some reason, which is being released in October/November, which everyone’s really excited about,” Schmidt noted in passing during the keynote presentation.

The news isn’t necessarily groundbreaking – as most analysts assumed all along that the OS would be launched alongside the rumored Droid/Nexus Prime smartphone in Q4 – but it is the first time that a Google exec has publicly suggested a release date for Ice Cream Sandwich, which was first teased in May at Google I/O.

So why should you be excited about the launch of yet another Android operating system? The answer is fragmentation.

Google is designing Ice Cream Sandwich to be “the one OS that works everywhere,” meaning it will run on all Android-powered phones and tablets. The hope is that the new mobile OS will eliminate the frustration that users (and developers) have with the dozens of versions of Android that are still out there today.

Android is often referred to as a singular entity, but it is far from it. Earlier this year, a report found that around 52 percent of Android phones were still running on version 2.2, also known as Froyo, while 35.2 percent were loaded with Android 2.1. At that time, less than one half of one percent of Android handsets were running on the newer Gingerbread OS.

Astonishingly, nearly 13 percent of handsets were still running versions 1.6 and 1.5, two of Android’s older operating systems.

While these numbers have surely changed in the last few months, the fragmentation of Android has not. In short, Google is looking to use the open source Ice Cream Sandwich to unify Android, an operating system that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs (News - Alert) once called a “very very fragmented“ OS that is a nightmare for developers to work with.

Check out the video below to watch Schmidt’s entire presentation. The piece on Android comes just after the 30-minute mark.

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Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell