Google first teased Ice Cream Sandwich at its developer conference in May. (Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

Images surfaced late Thursday afternoon that purport to show an unreleased new version of the Android operating system, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. The leaks first surfaced on Android enthusiast sites Android Police and RootzWiki.

From what we’re seeing, the images aren’t a radical departure from the most current release of Android for phones, version 2.3.4, code-named Gingerbread. What we’re seeing are minor tweaks — blue accents in the user interface, a redesigned version of the notification bar and Google’s “Shopper” app — but nothing that suggests a major overhaul.

Sources for AndroidPolice and RootzWiki, however, suggest there’s more to come that the pictures don’t show. According to sources for both sites, the newest version of Android will include a “panorama mode” for the phone’s camera, a new app launcher and application drawer and additions to Google’s “Shopper” app that allow NFC-enabled devices to use touch-enabled features.

A purported image from an unreleased version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich

Since Android was first released in 2008, Google’s mobile development team has ramped up the software release cycle. Currently, Google releases a new version of Android approximately every six months. It makes sense, then, for recent builds of Ice Cream Sandwich to surface in August, considering Android version 3.0 (Honeycomb) first debuted in February.

Google first teased the new version of Android at its developer conference — Google I/O — in May.

With every new Android version release, Google typically pairs up with a specific hardware manufacturer, strapping the new software to a brand new product. Google launched Gingerbread on Samsung’s Nexus S in December, while teaming with Motorola to launch Honeycomb on the Xoom tablet in February.

Though the leaked pictures show a Nexus S running the purported new version of Ice Cream Sandwich, a source tells both Android Police and RootzWiki that the first device to receive the new build will be the Nexus Prime, a rumored smartphone yet to be acknowledged by Google.

More of the leaked screenshots can be found at the Android Police and RootzWiki websites.