User experience was the main factor when deciding which devices will be upgraded

Dec 18, 2012 10:18 GMT  ·  By

Yesterday, Sony Mobile provided some more info on its plans for the delivery of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to users, and many people reacted negatively to the announcement.

Not only did Sony confirm that the update would be pushed to devices starting with the second part of Q1 2013, but it also announced that some devices would be left out of the upgrade process.

Xperia U, Xperia miro, Xperia tipo, and Xperia sola won’t be upgraded to Jelly Bean, Sony said, apparently due to the fact that they won’t deliver the expected experience once upgraded.

According to a recent article on XperiaBlog, Sony Mobile representative Anthony provided an explanation on why these devices will remain on the older platform release.

“The quality of Xperia’s software experience is dependent on a number of factors including: screen resolution, hardware platform and RAM. In the case of Xperia go, this combination came together in a way that meant the user experience running JB was not adversely affected,” he said.

“Unfortunately, in the case of Xperia tipo, Xperia miro, Xperia U and Xperia sola this wasn’t the case – so we made the decision to keep them on Ice Cream Sandwich.”

He also explained that Sony is set to provide users with the best possible smartphone experience, and that this is the main factor behind deciding which devices get new updates. It all comes down to hardware, functionality and stability, it seems.

“As we are making the JB upgrade available to a considerable portion of our 2012 portfolio, finding a balance between these elements, means the process takes a little longer than if we had done it only for particular models at the high end,” he said.

“We are continually investigating upgrades to the different/latest Android OS versions. As always, we will only share firm information when we’re confident of hitting the deadlines.”

Sony Mobile’s rep also said that, after thorough evaluation, the development team decided that the experience that Xperia devices in the 2011 lineup would deliver when upgraded to Jelly Bean would not be superior.

“The reason being – user experience is at the heart of our product development and support; after thorough evaluation, we concluded that the user experience for our 2011 Xperia smartphones will be superior if they remain on Ice Cream Sandwich versus being upgraded to Jelly Bean,” he said.

As mentioned above, Sony will start deploying Android 4.1 on its devices in February – March. Xperia T, Xperia TX and Xperia V will taste it first, followed by Xperia P, Xperia J, Xperia go, Xperia S, Xperia SL, Xperia ion and Xperia acro S.