With more and more manufactures being able to rollout the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update to get their respective handsets upgraded to the latest version of the Google mobile operating system, Sony decides to join in on the Ice Cream Sandwich fun with the rollout of the ICS update to the Sony Xperia Arc, its once flagship handset.
If you happen to have a Sony Xperia Arc for your mobile weapon of choice, this will indeed be great news as the time for your handset to finally get its own tasty treat of Ice Cream Sandwich is already at hand. Once this update finally lands on your handset and is subsequently applied, it will crank up the software version of your Sony Xperia Arc to Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich but the kernel of the handset will remain at 2.6.32.
Similar to OTA updates that is being used by other carriers and manufacturers, the ICS update for the Sony Xperia Arc will be unleashed in stages so you might need to check every once in a while if the update has already landed on your device. What is hugely different in the update process for the Sony Xperia Arc though is that users of the handset still need to check if the Si number of their handset (a number printed in the battery compartment of the Sony Xperia Arc) is already coming up in the support site of the manufacturer to check if the update is already available to be taken advantage of for that particular handset. This way, a user of the Sony Xperia Arc has no need to manually check for the update every so often but can instead head on over to the said support site to see if the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update is already available for their handset based on its SI number.
In addition to that, Sony has confirmed that Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Sony Xperia Neo is already being unleashed while the other handsets in the 2011 Xperia lineup of the manufacturer such as the Xperia Mini, Xperia Mini Pro, Xperia Active, Xperia Pro and the Live with Walkman are slated to get a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich sometime this week. The Xperia S on the other hand will get the update in late June while a Q3 rollout is slated for the Xperia P and Xperia U.
As for the Sony Xperia Arc, the handset is still a part of the single-core generation with its QualComm MSM8255 SnapDragon chipset which outfits the handset with a 1 GHz Scorpion processor, 512 MB of RAM and a dedicated Adreno 205 graphics chip. The storage space of the handset is malnourished at just 320 MB but it has a microSD card slot for memory expansion and its retail package includes an 8GB media card for this purpose so nobody should be complaining either. Its display on the other hand is 4.2-inch LED-backlit LCD panel made from scratch-resistant glass and has a resolution of 854 x 480 pixels. It only has one shooter though and it is a rear-facing 8MP camera capable of recording 720p clips at 30 frames per second.
