Welcome to another new weekly column where we round up all the Android-related rumors and discuss the validity of each one. Everyone seems to love our original rumor reports, but we thought it would be fun to examine the rumors from around the web and share our thoughts on the possibility of them coming true. Read on for this week's latest Android rumors.
Google Drive finally coming this April
Leaked Google Drive logo.
Rumor: Om Malik of GigaOm reports that Google Drive will launch sometime during the first week of April.
Our thoughts: Rumors of Google's cloud storage service go all the way back to 2006, but we know the service is currently in testing because the first screen shots were leaked in February. Om has been in the business for a long time and we trust his sources, but it's always hard to pin down an exact release date for Google products. We think a Google Drive launch is pending, so an April release sounds likely.
Probability: 80%
Jelly Bean to launch in Q3
Rumor: Taiwan newspaper Digitimes reports "Google may release its new platform, Android 5.0 (Jelly Bean), in the third quarter of 2012."
Our thoughts: Based out of Taipei, Digitimes often has access to information from supply chain sources that are based in Taiwan. We are fairly confident that the next version of Android is codenamed Jelly Bean (as first reported way back in 2010), but we don't know what version number Google will assign to it or when it will launch.
The popular belief is that Google will unveil the first details about Jelly Bean during their Google IO conference on June 27-29th. Google always talks about the future of Android during this show, so that's pretty much a given.
Right now we believe there are two options. First, Google could announce that Jelly Bean is a minor update, call it Android 4.1 or 4.5, and immediately release it for their Nexus line of phones and tablets. Second, we could learn that Jelly Bean will be a major update, be called Android 5.0, and be released in Q4 on the next flagship device.
Google has a
