Motorola’s Xoom was the first Android Honeycomb tablet, and the rumour mill says history’s about to repeat. Will the Xoom 2 be the first Ice Cream Sandwich tablet – and if it is, will it have cutting-edge hardware to match the software?

Let’s squat by the river of rumour to sift shiny fact nuggets from the slurry of speculation.

The Xoom 2 operating system will be Ice Cream Sandwich

This is one rumour many people are very sure of: tablets were conspicuous by their absence at this month’s Ice Cream Sandwich launch, so is Google’s pet manufacturer – Motorola Mobility’s becoming part of the Google empire – going to take the lead with Android 4.0 tablets? We’d like to think so, although the prototypes that have leaked so far were running Android 3.2, not 4.0.

As Ice Cream Sandwiches go, the Xoom 2 should be pretty tasty: we’re hearing tales of quad-core Kal-El chips and 64GB models with 4G radios. This Is My Next suggests an unnamed 1.2GB processor – probably Nvidia’s Tegra 3 – 1GB of “faster” RAM, 1080p video recording and 11 hours of battery life.

According to Droid-Life, leaked images from US mobile phone network Verizon’s database indicate that the Xoom 2 will have the model number MZ617, which corresponds to a 10.1-inch device in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB guises.