Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 to get Gingerbread
Sony Ericsson says its Xperia X10 smartphone will be getting an upgrade to Android 2.3, even though the company had said it would stop at Android 2.1.
Sony Ericsson has backtracked a bit on plans for its Xperia X10 smartphone, saying today that it will release an update to the Android operating system.
Toward the end of the second quarter or the beginning of the third quarter, Android 2.3 Gingerbread will be coming to the Android 2.1-equipped Xperia X10, the company announced on its blog. The update will be available to customers when they connect their devices to a computer, which means over-the-air updates are out.
Sony Ericsson previously said that it would not update the smartphone beyond Android 2.1 Eclair. Consumer demand, however, forced the company to relent.
"We have listened to our consumers," Sony Ericsson's Rikard Skogberg wrote in the post announcing the update.
Sony Ericsson released the Xperia X10 last year. The device comes with a 4-inch display and 1GHz processor. It has an 8.1-megapixel camera and the ability to record 720p HD video. The company first announced plans to release Android 2.1 Eclair on the device in May, but it took until October for it to actually start rolling it out to handsets.
When Android 2.3 Gingerbread is added to Xperia X10 handsets, customers running Eclair will lose some features. For one, facial recognition and the smile shutter will be gone, since the handset will force a changeover to the standard Android camera interface. The device's backup and restore feature will also be lost.
Sony Ericsson said that after upgrading their devices, users won't be able to downgrade to Android 2.1. Those who own the Xperia X10 Mini, Mini Pro, and X8 will be out of luck--they won't receive the Gingerbread update.