Did HTC just out Android 2.4?

We could scarcely believe our eyes when we read in HTC's press release last night that both the HTC Salsa and ChaCha "Facebook phones" will run Android 2.4, Gingerbread's successor.
Android 2.4? That at first seems unlikely given several factors--the fact that Android developers are just starting to roll out Gingerbread 2.3 phones at this show and elsewhere, the fact that Google just finished a substantial effort to educate developers about Gingerbread, and the fact that Google has stated that it's trying to consolidate its Android release cycles. That adds up to what could very well be a simple typo that missed its author's tired eyes.
And yet, HTC has promised us the phones by the end of the second fiscal quarter (that's the end of June.) That timetable theoretically makes it possible for Google to announce Android 2.4 at the company's annual I/O conference, held this May in San Francisco, or through vendors at CTIA in late March, and then release the OS to the pair of HTC handsets--in addition to Google's own Nexus S.
In addition, there's enough Web chatter to support the hypothesis. If it's true, HTC has outed Google in a way that steals Google's spotlight, presages the Android release cycle, and makes the slew of forthcoming Gingerbread phones already obsolete. Sure, as soon as one OS is announced we're already craning our necks for the next. And Google is no Apple, a company synonymous with controlling every details of a product's information and release until its recent pact with Verizon.

Source :  CNET