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

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.

Big things are about to happen this year for Sony Ericsson as promised during the Consumer Electronics show (CES) 2011.  A video released by Markus Hansson, currently employed by Sony Ericsson, on YouTube announced the company’s integration of Ant+ technology on their smartphone models. This is going to be the first time for smartphones to be integrated with Ant+.

To understand what Ant+ is we must first know what ANT is. ANT is a wireless sensor network that enables wireless devices to communicate with each other. Ant+ basically adds more function to ANT so that it is easier to manage the transfer and collection of data from various devices. Areas that benefit from this are sports, home health and wellness.