Author Archives: Karl-Johan Dahlström

A while ago, the Sony Xperia™ News room shared an update on our plans to upgrade certain Xperia™ devices to Jelly Bean. Since then we have received quite a few requests from the Android™ developer community to release an earlier version of the Jelly Bean (JB) software for the developers. This way, advanced developers could try it out and evaluate it, in a similar way to how we did it last year with the ICS alpha release. Please note that there are several limitations to this alpha software, for instance the UI look and feel is not updated to final Sony Jelly Bean software. Read more after the jump!

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Supporting the open developer community is as always important to us, and our latest contribution available is a binary blob for CyanogenMod (CM) that fixes an audio lib issue recently reported by the community. This patch is now available on a FreeXperia git repository. Read on to learn what it does, and how  Oskar Anderö (in the picture), helped CM with this binary blob. Oskar is a software developer at Sony.

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Today, XDA-developers comes with some great news, as they have announced that Sony is named OEM of the year. We’re really honored by this, and we’re glad to see that our collaborations with the tech community are being so appreciated. We would actually like to send a big thank you to all of you in the community, especially highlighting the FreeXperia team for all their work. Going forward, we will continue to support the tech community. Stay tuned to Developer World, more dev-friendly initiatives are coming soon! Read more about Sony being named “OEM of the year” on the XDA website.

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As many of you already know, Jean-Baptiste Queru, aka JBQ, Technical Lead for the Android™ Open-Source Project (AOSP) at Google, recently started an open source project to build a vanilla Android version for Xperia S (LT26i). From Sony side, we welcome the project and support it with resources and contributions. We always try to promote and support external innovation and the openness that Android brings. We have now published binaries required for the LT26i project to progress. In addition, we want to encourage the open Android community to participate. Read on for download links and more information!

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We are now releasing a sensor framework, referred to as DASH (Dynamic Android Sensor HAL), as an open source GitHub project. This actually means that we are the first manufacturer to release such a sensor framework. By making this open source, we hope that custom ROM developers will gain a lot from using it, and we also hope to see the community of developers help us improve the framework by contributing back (which we’ve already seen from CyanogenMod team). In this article, Oskar Anderö, a Sony Mobile software engineer, explains how DASH works, and how developers can contribute.

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Upon request we’re today releasing an Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) beta for Xperia™ PLAY, and we’re really interested in getting your feedback on this beta release. As games are such a crucial part of Xperia™ PLAY, we would like to know how well this ICS beta for Xperia™ PLAY works when you’re playing games. Read on for download links and installation instructions!

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As part of our continuing efforts towards openness and knowledge sharing, we are now stepping up our open source activities. For a long time, we have been one of the major contributors to the Android Open Source Project. We’ve also been active in the open developer community where we most notably published an ICS alpha release a couple of months ago. And now, we’re excited to release a couple of new open source projects that are available on our GitHub. As you can see below, we have just now released two very interesting projects as open source: the analysis tool ChkBugReport, and our WebGL implementation for Android™ 4.0.

This way, we would like to continue to be transparent, share our knowledge, and get external developer contributions to make the tools even better. On our GitHub, you can also find our Web SDK  project we published a while back, and a project called DrmLicenseService, which we will tell more about soon. Stay tuned for more information about open source projects going forward!

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Last week we made an Ice Cream Sandwich alpha ROM available for unlocked Xperia™ phones. The response we got was overwhelming, and we want to say a big thank you for all your great feedback and the huge interest shown! We will look through all the comments we received in the survey, on the blog post and on the video, and incorporate the input into our planning of future software and product releases. We have now also made the open source archive for the Ice Cream Sandwich alpha ROM available. In addition, the sensor HAL will also be available as open source soon.

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To show our continuous support to the open developer community, and get your valuable feedback, we are today making an alpha ROM of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.1) for Xperia™ arc S, Xperia™ neo V and Xperia™ ray available for download. This is something we have not done before, and we are obviously very excited about it. 

This ROM is strictly targeting advanced developers, and it will not work for ordinary everyday usage, as it only has a limited set of features working (you can for example not make any phone calls). Several more legal and usage conditions apply – please see the Important information section below for more details.

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As promised when we announced our support of independent developers, we have now made the camera library binaries for a number of Sony Ericsson phones available under a special end user license agreement (EULA). You can use these camera libraries to handle the camera hardware in our 2011 Xperia™ phones except Xperia™ PLAY, which has a different camera module.

Download and find out more after the jump.

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