Several hours from the South Pole, in the barren expanses of western Antarctica, a small team of American researchers has just finished their second field-season with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core project.

ECONOMIST: The South Pole as location and metaphor

Instead it was loaded up with Ice Cream Sandwich, which the slate's dual-core OMAP silicon kept humming smoothly during our brief time with it.

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According to the listed specs, it features a 4.5-inch HD Colorboost (720 x 1, 280) display, 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, and will ship with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and (predictably) looks very much like the Droid RAZR.

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Furthermore, the high-quality dating of the WAIS Divide core will make it easy to correlate with cores from Greenland's ice sheet, allowing for a tighter coupling of records from the Artic and the Antarctic.

ECONOMIST: The South Pole as location and metaphor