Sony Ericsson announced on its blog that it will update unbranded versions of the Xperia X10 to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) in the second or third quarter of this year. That’s a pretty stunning announcement, considering Sony Ericsson had said earlier that it had no plans to update the Xperia X10 beyond Android 2.1 (Eclair). The company says it will alert customers at a later point in time if it ever plans to roll-out the update to carrier-branded Xperia X10 devices, but we seriously doubt it’ll ever hit the AT&T Xperia X10. Hit the jump for a list of some changes users will see when the Gingerbread update rolls out.

Sony Ericsson notes that the following changes will be made once Android 2.3 is applied to a current Android 2.1 Xperia X10:

The current plan is that the Xperia X10 will get the Android standard Camera user interface and therefore features like e.g. face recognition, smile shutter etc will be lost.

Moxier is replaced by the gingerbread native EAS functionality.

Mediascape is being replaced by the media experience widgets and music player included in our new 2011 products.

DRM keys for protected content on your phone will be lost in the upgrade process.

The Sony Ericsson Backup and Restore client is not supported in the Gingerbread version and will therefore be lost.

Support for bi-directional languages will be reduced compared to the latest version of the 2.1 version of the Xperia X10.

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