Apples and Ice Cream

If you know anything about tech or just really love your smartphone, than this holidays season is going to be a great time for you. Multiple reports out this week are setting the stage for what will be a mobile battlefield for Holiday '11.

Up first is the always elusive next iPhone release. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is this time round adding Sprint to it's ranks along side Ma Bell and Big Red to it's release. This represents a major move for Apple, which makes makes the available on virtually every carrier in the US. Along side the WSJ report is another report, this time from BGR who is sighting an internal Best Buy memo that pegs the first week of October as the iPhone (5/4s/HD) release week. With the big blue store taking pre-orders, supposedly starting on the 1st. Which means we should expect an announcement from Apple sometime between now and then.

Also poised to set the world ablaze is Google, which is set to unleash a new, fourth, version of Android, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. Today out of Dreamforce former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, while delivering the keynote address at the conference basically ousted the release window for Android 4.0, pegging an October/November release window for ICS. This also places the next Nexus release tentatively called the Nexus Prime (or DROID Prime for Verizon's flavor of the device) and made by Samsung into that same release window, with the device premiering with the new software.

So no matter if you prefer apples or ice cream this winter is set to be a great one for smartphone consumers!