Louis Gray

Squashing any lingering doubts about the arrival of the next version of Android, Google has put up a Jelly Bean sculpture on its campus.

The sculpture appears next to others in a collection of alphabetically ordered sweets after which new versions of Google's mobile operating system is named: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Google Developers Google+ page showed off the new sculpture today, the day before the company's Google I/O conference begins in San Francisco. The show is geared for Android and Web developers and others who tap into Google's technology.

Update: If you want to see what the sculpture looks like when Google isn't busy spilling the beans, so to speak, here's a look at the Android Jelly Bean sculpture upright.

It's not certain what the version number of Jelly Bean will be, but the smart money is on 4.1. Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, still is a relative rarity in the world, reflecting the difficulties Google is having keeping the large number of partners in the Android realm up to date. Despite those difficulties, though, Android continues to spread.

A likely vehicle to deliver Jelly Bean to market: Google's 7-inch Nexus Android tablet expected to debut at Google I/O.