If you happened to be browsing the UK site SoMobile yesterday for some mobile news, you got a heaping helping of surprise when you found that a UK spokeperson supposedly confirmed the notion that all 2011 Sony Ericsson XPERIA devices would be getting Android’s next-gen mobile OS. From what we understand given the information we got from Eric Schmidt himself, this new version of Android will be released inside October or November of 2011. What we’re to understand now is that Android 4.0 has NOT been decided on for the XPERIA 2011 lineup as of yet, this being confirmed directly to Chris Davies of SlashGear in this morning’s UK afternoon.
While this may come as a surprise to some, those of the ladies and gentlemen in the audience who know of the potential for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich can guess that Ice Cream Sandwich may not be the best system to add to an already-established line of Sony Ericsson devices. Sony Ericsson representatives spoke with SlashGear today saying the following:
“When it comes to future platforms of the Android OS, we will make them available to consumers in a timely manner as long as they improve the user experience and are viable from a hardware point of view.” – Sony Ericsson to SG
We know from our original official introduction to Ice Cream Sandwich back at Google I/O 2011 that “This new version of Android wont have any new hardware requirements.” This means that should a device be capable of running Ice Cream Sandwich if it’s already capable of running either the tablet-based Android 3.x Honeycomb or the handset-based Android 2.3.x Gingerbread. The announcement above only covers the news that Sony Ericsson had “confirmed” they’d be upgrading their 2011 line, instead they’re just noting that there’s no official policy that they’re sharing on upgrades at the moment.
Will we see 2011 Sony Ericsson XPERIA devices upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich?
Only your barber knows for sure.
[via SlashGear]
