Over the past few months we’ve been testing a potential Android 4.0 update for some Sony phones – the Xperia ray, Xperia arc and Xperia neo. Unfortunately the testing didn’t meet our requirements.

When a manufacturer releases a new version of Android for their phones, we will usually test this software to make sure it is right for our customers. Often the software passes our testing and sometimes we spot a few small issues that our testing team quickly work to fix – you can read more about this in our Tester Diaries. We do this testing as we want O2 customers to have the best experience possible when using their phone.

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.

What this means
The ray, arc and neo will remain on the stable Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

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.

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