While Sony Ericsson’s budget Xperia smartphone may not be to everyone’s liking, for those new to the world of Android and/or those on a budget, the Xperia X8 steps up to the mark.

Previously the Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 was on sale for around £100 but, now O2 have dropped the price of the handset down to £79.99 for either the black model or white model. A minimum top up is not required and delivery is free. O2 are also offering customers a £20 gift voucher with the Xperia X8, as they are with the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro.

The £20 voucher effectively makes the handset only £60. You can choose a £20 gift voucher for Amazon, Argos, Boots, Next or Pizza Hut.

An update to the custom ROM CyanogenMod has been released, after a short delay on the expected release date. Version 7.1 of CyanogenMod is now available to those adventurous Xperia owners as it is now working on all of the 2011 Xperia handsets including the Xperia Play, Xperia Arc, Xperia Mini and Mini Pro, Xperia Ray and the Xperia Neo handsets. Even the Xperia X8 is catered for with version 7.1.

The FreeXperia team have been working tirelessly to get this custom ROM up and running on the Xperia range of phones and Sony Ericsson themselves shocked the developer scene recently by handing the team 20 Xperia handsets and technical information in order to help make CyanogenMod work with their products. It has to be noted however that despite encouraging the developers in such a way, Sony Ericsson still stand by the ‘rule’ that if you modify your Xperia handset by flashing a custom ROM to it, you will invalidate your warranty so be warned before taking the plunge.

XDA-Developers member the_laser has released a method to unlock the bootloader on both the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and the Xperia X8 handsets. The same method can be used to unlock the bootloaders on all the 2010 released models of mobiles from Sony Ericsson.

Unlocking the bootloader is a risky process however and should be done with much caution. If you don’t have confidence in your ability to go ahead and unlock your own handset’s bootloader then the advice would be to just not do it. However, if you are determined to have deep root access on your phone to install custom ROMs for example then the details and instructions can be found at the following links:

Xperia X10 Bootloader Unlock
Xperia X8 Bootloader Unlock

We’ve provided information on how to root the Xperia handsets here before and in the past rooting has always been for a positive reason. The main reason for rooting is that it allows you to remove preinstalled apps, either installed by Sony Ericsson such as Timescape, or network specific apps such as Vodafone’s 360 application. There are of course other positive reasons to root your handset and with Google Android being a pretty open OS, rooting hasn’t been much of a problem. That may change soon however.

When Sony Ericsson announced that they had changed their plans for the Xperia X10 and that it would not be stuck on Android 2.1 but, would instead be upgraded to Android 2.3 during the end of Q2/start of Q3, this pleased many customers. However it still left some of Sony Ericsson’s customers rather angry, as while this was great news for owners of the Xperia X10, it was also announced that the X10 Mini, X10 Mini Pro and Xperia X8 were not part of these plans and would remain on Android 2.1 as previously stated.

When Sony Ericsson announced that they would not be upgrading the Xperia X10 past Android 2.1, this left a lot of users very angry and caused many to swear they’d never go back to Sony Ericsson. In light of this, Sony Ericsson have listened to the feedback and have today confirmed that the Xperia X10 will be updated past Android 2.1.

They will skip Android 2.2 and move straight onto 2.3, which is currently the latest version of Android available. The work they’ve done with the new line of handsets, the Xperia Arc, Neo and Play has enabled them to work with Android 2.3 and gave them a solution to making 2.3 possible on the X10. The update will be Android 2.3.3 and will become available from the end of Q2/early Q3.