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It was only last week that Sony began to update the Xperia P with Ice Cream Sandwich, but it looks like the company is now going full steam ahead and bringing the update to no fewer than 8 more devices this week.
Sony has done an excellent job at being transparent with its progress on the bringing Ice Cream Sandwich to a number of Xperia devices. It has kept users aware of what's going on throughout the process, as well as shared alpha and beta builds along the way. Now, though, it looks like the beta days are behind them and the build is ready for prime time for a certain Xperia devices.
Before Sony Ericsson became Sony Mobile, the company seemed committed to developing an Android 4.0 update, going so far as to release alpha ROMs for a number of Xperia devices, and more recently a beta for the Xperia Play. Here we are, a quarter of the way into 2012, and Xperia owners are still gnawing on last year's official Gingerbread. Although, there may finally be a light at the end of the tunnel; the Sony Mobile blog has announced that the first Android 4.0 updates will roll out to select Xperia phones in mid-April. Don't get too excited when wireless carriers are involved though.
There must be something weird going on with manufacturers lately - first Huawei released an alpha build of ICS for the Honor, and now Sony Ericsson (soon to be just Sony) has released an ICS ROM for certain unlocked Xperia devices, including the Arc S, Neo V, and Ray.
At the beginning of August, the CM team announced that they would be supporting the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, arc, and neo. Cyanogen himself has now announced via Google+ that they have joined together with the FreeXperia Team to bring CM7 to seven other Xperia devices in future releases, totaling the number of supported Xperia devices to ten. The full list includes:
Good news, Xperia Play, neo, and arc owners: the worlds greatest custom ROM, CyanogenMod, is coming soon to a device near you! Thanks to some newly submitted code, support for these devices can be expected to hit the CyanogenMod repositories soon, and nightlies will be available shortly after that.
Facing massive infrastructure disruption caused by the earthquake and tsunami last month, Japanese manufacturer Sony has been forced to cut back production on all of its upcoming Xperia devices.
The days where the Nexus S was the sole Android 2.3 smartphone are over, it seems - as are the days where Sony Ericsson had only one Android-powered Xperia-branded device.