The Sony Xperia X Compact, Sony’s new cute little smartphone which we talked about at length here, was launched barely a few weeks back at IFA 2016 in Berlin. Sony is showing that it is not backing down from its commitment to cater to developers and third party ROMs by putting the new compact smartphone under its Open Device Program.
Just to be clear, this situation is different from Sony’s Android 7.0 beta program they made available on several phones. That one makes pre-built beta builds of Android Nougat available for certain phones. This one unlocks the bootloader of the Sony Xperia X Compact and allows developers to build ROMs especially from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Sony has even provided the necessary binaries for you to be able to build either an Android Nougat AOSP ROM or an Android Marshmallow one. To remind you, the device features a small 4.6-inch HD (720p) screen powered by a hexacore Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 supported by 3GB RAM.
You can’t even buy an Xperia X Compact easily from the market yet, but it’s good to know that Sony is allowing people to do stuff with it. At the very least, that’s what I would expect from a small phone that should retail near USD$500.
SOURCE: Sony
I was aware about this device before, and now they have my attention.