O2: no Ice Cream Sandwich for some Sony Xperia owners
Let them eat Gingerbread
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O2 won't be certifying Android 4.0 for Sony's Xperia Neo, Arc and Ray handsets, the network operator has said, after testing the OS on these devices and finding it "didn’t meet our requirements".
Says the carrier: "Unfortunately with the Ray, Arc and Neo our testing found that the software update affected the phone’s speed and performance. These issues were present on three separate versions of the Android 4.0 software we tested and are caused by the software having more advanced hardware requirements than previous versions.
"Because the software affects the phone’s performance in this way and because you can’t revert back to an earlier version of Android without having your phone completely restored, we have decided not to approve the update.
"This means it won’t be available for O2 customers on these phones."
Punters will have to stay with their existing Gingerbread installs, there being no further software updates in the pipeline. ®
COMMENTS
Crapware
It'll be the combination of O2 and Sony's crapware that tips the balance, then. Reports are that although ICS likes a gig, it will run perfectly happily in half that in its purest form.
I don't blame O2, Sony borked the ICS update
This might not be a popular view - but I can see O2's point. The ICS update *is* laggy, some apps are much slower (the dialler for example), video recording performance is shockingly bad and some games don't even run let alone perform like they did on GB. So if you update to ICS and aren't happy then who's going to take the flak? Who are you going to complain to? O2 of course. And because you can't officially downgrade to GB then O2 just couldn't take the risk. Why should O2 have to take the blame - and potentially lose customers - because Sony borked the ICS update? Remember that most people with these phones aren't techies and won't know about things like FlashTool, XDA, etc.
I'm an arc S owner and a fan of Xperia devices in general but Sony messed this up. The latest f/w (587) is a *little* better but it still doesn't match GB in terms of performance. When ICS was first released for the arc the official Sony support forum was stuffed full of people complaining so it's no wonder O2 decided against this sort of grief.
Android 4.0.4 via other routes then:
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/devices
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