An easter egg is a hidden surprise in a website or app, and Google is famous for them. Not only does the company have a yearly tradition of April Fools' jokes, but there's a long list of things you can type into the Google search engine that produce ... interesting results.
As it turns out, there are also a few easter eggs for Android, Google's open-source operating system for tablets and smartphones. Here's a quick rundown:
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich: Nyandroid
Nyan Cat is the famous "Pop Tart Cat" from animations and Flash games all over the Internet. And while Nyan Cat herself hasn't come to Android (at least, not in the same game as the official one online), Nyan-droid is what Android enthusiasts have dubbed the Ice Cream Sandwich easter egg: An animation of the Android mascot, with its middle replaced by an ice cream sandwich.
Repeatedly tapping on the Android version number in Settings -> About reveals the Nyandroid, as seen in this video, and long-pressing on the Nyandroid turns it into a swarm of Nyandroids that fly across your Galaxy Nexus' screen. (Right now the Galaxy Nexus is the only Android device that runs Ice Cream Sandwich.) Fan-made Nyandroid appearances include a boot animation, and a live wallpaper.
The first sight of anything Nyandroid-ish was a rainbow-trailing Android mascot used as the icon for the new version of logcat, an Android debugging tool (which does not actually contain any cats). Android developers had filed a bug saying the icon needed to be Nyan Cat, but were happy with the new Nyandroid icon, claiming it granted them debugging superpowers.
Android 3.0 Honeycomb: "REZZZZZZZ... "
What noise do honeybees make in the world of Tron? Well, now you know, in case that's ever a clue on Jeopardy.
As you can see in this video preview of Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the first tablet version of Android bore more than a passing resemblance to the styles seen in Disney's movie Tron: Legacy. "Rezzing" and "de-rezzing" were slang terms for creating and destroying things in the world of Tron, and the former makes a cameo in the Honeycomb easter egg: Repeatedly tap on the version number in Settings -> About, and the Android mascot will take over your screen in the form of an electric blue honeybee, and make that noise in a word bubble.
Android 2.3 Gingerbread: Zombie Androidpocalypse
This thread on the XDA-Developers message board shows what happens when you try the Settings -> About trick on Gingerbread, the version of Android used by most modern Android smartphones: You see a (mildly disturbing) painting of the Android mascot and a swarm of zombies, including a Gingerbread man with sharp teeth.
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