Sony expects most of its Xperia handsets to be upgraded to Android 4.0 over the next two months.
The company will be rolling out the update to the latest software, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, at the end of April and early May.
That’s a bit later than the company’s original expectation of March, but still significantly sooner than other manufacturers, some of which aren’t promising Android updates until the second half of the year.
The upgrades will of course include phones that were sold under the Sony Ericsson brand. They are now all under the Sony corporate umbrella after it bought out its partner Ericsson’s stake in the former joint venture.
The first set of phones slated for updates are the Xperia arc S, Xperia neo V and Xperia ray. The Xperia arc, Xperia PLAY, Xperia neo, Xperia mini, Xperia mini pro, Xperia pro, Xperia active and Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman will all get Ice Cream Sandwich a little bit later.
And finally, the Xperia S will be one of the last from Sony to get the new Android platform.
Sony Ericsson had assured consumers it plans to upgrade every one of its phones in the “Xperia” line. No other manufacturer has managed to confirm ICS upgrades for that many handsets.
The process of updating to ICS has been problematic at times, with the Nexus S smartphone and the Transformer Prime tablet each experiencing crashes and other bugs during their upgrade process.
However, more recent device updates have been much smoother, giving confidence to manufacturers that the bugs have been ironed out.
