Sony Ericsson have confirmed that they will be updating all of their 2011 range of Xperia smartphones to Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich. The update will begin rolling out in March 2012 to the Xperia Arc S, Neo V and Ray initially.

The other 2011 handsets, such as the original Xperia Arc and Neo models, Xperia Play, Xperia Mini, Xperia Mini Pro, Xperia Pro, Xperia Active will get the update in late April to early May 2012. The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman will also be getting an update to ICS at the same time as the Xperia family.

Despite their recent ‘boo-boo’ when they mistakenly posted news of their offering of 50GB of cloud storage space free for Xperia owners, Sony Ericsson have moved to confirm that the offer should go live soon, just not as soon as they announced it would on their official blog.

Xperia handset owners should, at some point in the near future, be entitled to a whopping 50GB of storage, via an app on Xperia handsets (which will be downloaded from the Android Market) through cloud storage provider Box in a deal struck between themselves and Sony Ericsson.

EA and Sony Ericsson are offering Xperia Play customers an all new exclusive title in the form of the hugely popular football game Fifa 12. To top off the excitement, the game is also free to download and will be exclusive to the Xperia Play until February 21st next year.

“With FIFA 12, fans of football can expect improved gameplay depth, authentic commentaries, updated teams from the world’s top leagues, and all new replay systems and stadium designs to enhance the FIFA experience” – Sony Ericsson

As expected, the game includes the same style of gameplay that was found in Fifa 10 and Fifa 11 on the Xperia Play as it is optimized fully for use on the handset, using it’s unique control system and game pad. Fifa 12 can be downloaded now (from the game launcher on the Xperia Play) and it’s a big download, over 1.5GB, so  a Wi-Fi connection will probably be required.

Sony Ericsson have declared themselves as the first mobile phone manufacturer to include support for WebGL technology on their handsets. WebGL is a technology that allows 3D graphic rendering to be viewed on browsers without the need for additional plugins and although the technology has been around for a little while now, Sony Ericsson have jumped in with open arms to integrate WebGL support into it’s range of 2011 Xperia handsets.

WebGL support was added to the newer Xperia range via the recent Android 2.3.4 update, although when the update was released Sony Ericsson kept this new feature quiet, choosing to release the information in a press release seperately. The WebGL technology does need the higher specifications found in the latest, more powerful Xperia handsets, to run as from Sony Ericsson explains:

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.