Google recently made Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”) available to mobile phones in the US market, where it debuted December 18 on the Samsung Nexus S, exclusively through Best Buy. Not even carrier T-Mobile’s stores have it (citing the Best Buy deal as by “special arrangement”).

The first phone designed specifically for the Gingerbread OS, the Nexus S is in use in Japan, Australia and the UK. While Google debuted Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) to the US market with the Motorola XOOM tablet unveiled at CES, reports are now surfacing that rather than migrate phones to Gingerbread, Google will bump them to Android 2.4.

The website Erictric reports Android 2.4 is “already in the wild … caught running on a Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc prototype” at CES where, allegedly, an unwitting Sony representative handed the tricked-out device “to one of the folks from Dutch site Tweakers.net (Google Translation).”

Since Google has consistently emphasized how Android was optimized for its platform, it could wind up that the low-powered phone sector hangs onto Gingerbread for a while, with Honeycomb staking its claim in tablets.

Google’s first commercial Android release, called “Éclair,” made its first retail appearance as Android 2.0, later updating to version 2.1.