Google loves its food. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the lineup of Android operating system titles. From “Eclair” to “Gingerbread” and beyond, the Android names are all about tasty treats. They even run in alphabetical order (from “Cupcake” to “Honeycomb”). We knew, then, that the upcoming Android OS would be a sweet with an “I” name. Well, the title, as well as a number of details on the OS, are now official.

The announcement was made at Google I/O, the developer conference that took place earlier in May. The OS will be dubbed “Ice Cream Sandwich,” and it already has a snazzy logo. But this won’t just be one more operating system for Google. Rather, this will be the OS to end all OS’s; quite literally, it is “one OS, everywhere.” That means the end of the 3.x development line (specifically oriented to tablets), and could eventually mean a merger with Chrome OS, the other prominent operating system in Google’s pipeline.

The major reasons for the integration is that Android has reached a point of extreme adaptability. It has all the factors necessarily for tablets, but has programmed them in a way that makes them viable in the smartphone environment. Further, the new Ice Cream Sandwich API will allow developers to easily manipulate portions of the UI, such as the “action bar” (which replaces the usual hardware action buttons), for size and placement, conforming them to the form factor in question (be it smartphone or laptop).

Ice Cream Sandwich is sure to have plenty of features, and a few – such as peer-to-peer NFC, automatic video/audio focus, and more – have been released. The rest, however, will be unrolled closer to the release of ICS itself, which isn’t slated for public use until the fourth quarter of 2011.