Sony gives Xperia ICS timing but warns over stability
Sony has revealed the timing for the Android 'Ice Cream Sandwich' 4 updates that will be coming to its Xperia smartphones, suggesting that the handsets will get the upgrade before Sony's tablets.
In a blog post on Friday, Sony said the Xperia upgrades would begin in mid-April. However, it also suggested that the new version of the OS would be less stable on the 2011 Xperia phones than its Gingerbread predecessor.
Android ICS (right) brings a fresher interface to Xperia phones but at the cost of stability. Image credit: Sony
"The first Xperia models to receive the upgrade will be Xperia arc S, Xperia neo V and Xperia ray. For these first models, the rollout will start mid-April and continue over 4-6 weeks," Sony said on Friday. "Following on, Xperia arc, Xperia PLAY, Xperia neo, Xperia mini, Xperia mini pro, Xperia pro, Xperia active and Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman will receive their scoop starting from the end of May/early June."
The company stressed that, as is almost always the case with Android updates, the stated timings depend on the customer's operator and how long that carrier takes to modify ICS to its liking.
Sony said it will not be making the ICS smartphone upgrade available over 3G or Wi-Fi, but will force users to load it over a wired PC or Mac connection.
"Because this update is a significant revamp of some of your phone’s features, we want to make sure you take a conscious and informed decision to upgrade," the company claimed, adding that this meant users would not get any update request or notification that the upgrade is available.
Perhaps worryingly for some, Sony suggested in a separate post that the ICS upgrade would not be completely stable.
"Maybe you will prefer the new UI in ICS, or do you give a higher priority to the extreme stability of the Gingerbread platform?" the post posited.
"We are actually proud to say that our Gingerbread software is very stable and has great performance, so it’s not a bad idea to stay on this release. Ice Cream Sandwich is more intensive, for example in terms of resource usage… On the other hand, ICS brings a refined UI and some nice new features," Sony's post continued.
Resource usage appears to be the big problem with the ICS upgrade. Sony's 2011 Xperia phones only have 512MB of RAM, and the company noted that apps tends to use more RAM in ICS than in earlier Android iterations.
"When running low on RAM, typically with less than approximately 40MB left, the activity manager will start to close processes according to priority. At first, idle background activities are killed. The last thing to be closed down is the foreground activity," Sony said.
Sony also noted that, in ICS, "Google has moved a lot of the SQL handling from the native to the Java layer".
"In our internal studies, we have seen that read and write operations to the SQL database takes [a] longer time, which slows down the apps," the company added.