The Sony Mobile developer team has updated its recent blog post where it discussed the pros and cons of updating the 2011 Xperia range to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. It said that the challenges posed by ICS with older hardware has been “addressed by our SW engineering teams”. This includes RAM management optimisation as well as a ‘Performance assistant’ that will launch when the phone starts. This will enable you to enable/disable certain apps to optimise the performance of your Xperia. The developer team reiterated that it is their “aim to deliver an as good ICS update as ever possible”. Sounds good to us. See the full statement below.



Updated – comment from the Developer World team:

We would like to clarify that above mentioned “challenges” have already been addressed by our SW engineering teams. For instance, we have not only optimised the RAM management by making the RAM usage for internal apps as good as possible, but we will also introduce a Performance assistant at start up when running ICS. In this Performance assistant, you can enable and disable certain services that you might not want to run on your phone, in order to optimise the performance of your phone.

We have also worked with quite a few partners in regards to architecture optimisations for SQL handling. In addition, we have also optimised the hardware usage. And as a result of this article, a number of app developers have notified us that they are evaluating if HW optimisation will be needed or not for their apps.

The aim of this article was to share our knowledge regarding the different characteristics for ICS and Gingerbread in an open way, as we strive to have an open communication with the developer community. All in all, we would like to point out that it’s our clear aim to deliver an as good ICS update as ever possible. As you might have seen on the Sony Xperia Product Blog, we’re not far from releasing it now. Thanks for all the feedback!