Sony revises Ice Cream Sandwich update plans, delays updates to Q2
Last year, Sony announced that they would be upgrading most of their Xperia devices to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich by March of this year. Unfortunately, March is little more than a day from being over, and as none of the updates are quite ready, Sony has been forced to revise their release timeline to provide a little extra time for them to work out the problems.
At this point, the earliest updates will begin in April, and go out to devices like the Xperia Arc S, Xperia Ray, and Xperia Neo V, all hardly flagship phones. By June, the update should be out for the Xperia Arc, Xperia Play, Xperia Pro, Xperia Mini, and a few others. However, the Sony Xperia S will have to wait the longest for the update, and won't get it until late Q2 (June) of this year, which will certainly be disappointing for owners of the flagship device.
Interestingly, devices that are from 2011 won't be updated automatically over the air. Instead, users will have to install the update through a PC companion app. According to Sony, this is because for these older devices, Ice Cream Sandwich may reduce performance, and they don't want to change what already works and that users are used to.
While this delay is certainly going to be disappointing for many users, beta ROMs are already out for quite a few of the devices on the update list, so users who really want Ice Cream Sandwich can get it. Even with devices for which no beta is available, it is still great that Sony has released such a detailed timeline, and once again I wish this would be a trend that begins to catch on.
[Sony Mobile | Sony Developer World]