UK mobile operator O2 has said users of its Xperia ray, Xperia arc and Xperia neo handsets will not be getting upgraded to the latest version of Android.
In a posting on its blog, the company said testing of the Sony supplied Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) upgrade “didn’t meet our requirements” and the handsets would be left running Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
Unfortunately with the Xperia 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, as Sony explain on their site – “Android 4.0’s hardware requirements are more advanced than previous software updates, so your phone’s performance may be affected.”
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.
We pride ourselves on putting our customers at the heart of everything we do and will continue to monitor the situation, however at the moment there are no new software versions planned for these phones. This means these phones will remain on Android 2.3 Gingerbread which is a very stable platform.