Android 5.0 Jelly Bean might be coming to "WebTop" OS

The latest version of Google’s operating system is reportedly going to play nice with Motorola’s “WebTop” platform.

If you don’t know what that is, perhaps you’ve heard of the Motorola Atrix phone. It allows users to dock the phone into a special laptop attachment, and the phone essentially becomes the motherboard for the laptop.

The phone-powered laptop uses a proprietary Motorola interface, which it has called WebTop, but it may opt to use the Jelly Bean interface for the future of these laptop-enabled smartphones.

We still don’t know much about Jelly Bean, also known as Android 5.0, but it may be coming out sooner than expected, even though there have been problems with the Android 4.0 rollout process.

Both the Nexus S phone and the Transformer Prime tablet issued upgrades, only to have users complain that their device started freezing or crashing uncontrollably. As a result, manufacturers have become increasingly tepid about their ICS rollout plans.

Motorola announced this week that it would not be updating most of its devices until the second quarter of 2012. And now, Digitimes is reporting that according to overseas component suppliers, Android 5.0, known as Jelly Bean, is already making its way into discussions.

The site reports that Jelly Bean may make its debut in the second quarter of 2012 as well, completely overshadowing the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade process.

Interestingly, though, Digitimes notes that Android 5.0 has its eye on tablets as well as potentially notebook and netbook computers. Google wants to make a splash in the market where both Microsoft and Apple are capturing a lot of attention with their respective operating system updates this year.

With a problematic Android 4.0 rollout, manufacturers are understandably uneasy about Android 5.0. We all knew Android was growing too big too fast, and it looks like the steam train has finally hit a roadblock.