Rushing software means rushing hardware

Much like with the iPhone, we have to keep in mind that Google rushing Ice Cream Sandwich has impacts both on hardware and software. To rush Ice Cream Sandwich, also means to rush the Nexus Prime, and the Android ecosystem has already seen what rushing out an OS can look like, twice actually. First, while Gingerbread wasn't rushed out, it certainly felt like the Nexus S was rushed in order to launch in time for the holidays last year. This meant, that unlike the Nexus One, which drove improvements around the Android ecosystem, the Nexus S was actually a generation behind within a few months of release, because of the coming of Tegra 2 phones with qHD screens. So, instead of the Google Experience phone being the pace car for users, manufacturers and developers, the Nexus S quickly became an afterthought. 

Then, we saw Honeycomb was rushed out in order to compete head to head with the iPad 2, and because Honeycomb was rushed, so was the Motorola Xoom. As a result there, the Xoom was a little too heavy, too bland in design, and too expensive, while Honeycomb was buggy and lacking in natively designed 3rd party apps. Imagine that instead of pushing the Xoom so hard, Google had simply seeded the developer community with Honeycomb, and tested longer. The, start the Honeycomb party a few months later with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Android 3.1 at Google I/O? Imagine erasing the Xoom from the board all together, and having the Android tablet charge begin in May with the $400 Asus Transformer, and the sleek and sexy Galaxy Tab 10.1. The three month head start for Apple seems like a reasonable trade-off for having better developer support and more consumer interest that would have come with not having an $800 beast be the first impression of Honeycomb.

That brings us to Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus Prime. We know that NVIDIA has already pushed back the expected release of the quad-core Tegra 3 chipsets, so if we're hoping for that to power the Prime, we'd have to wait until early 2012. Of course, the newly teased relationship between Google and Texas Instruments could mean that the Tegra 3 has already been removed from the equation. If it has, will we see the same fate for the Prime as for the Nexus S? A dual-core TI CPU would have to be really good to stand up against the first quad-core offerings that would come a few months afterwards. And, that's not even taking into account the 768x1280 screens from Samsung that we're already hoping to see grace the Nexus Prime. There's no guarantee that Samsung could bring that screen to market in time for October.