Sony stated that the availability and scheduling of the software upgrades will vary by market and carrier requirements. According to Sony South Africa, the ICS update is locally available for the  Xperia arc, Xperia arc S, Xperia ray, and Xperia neo V. The update is still in the testing phase for some of the other devices in the 2011 Xperia range including the Xperia neo, Xperia Pro and Xperia active. Besides the ICS upgrade, this update also incorporates bug fixes, performance tweaks as well as other firmware enhancements.

Some of these performance tweaks and firmware enhancement includes:

In addition to the list of devices above, Sony is also looking to make this update available “over the next few weeks” (overseas at least) to the Xperia mini pro, Xperia neo L and Live with Walkman.

The Japanese firm said that users whose devices still operate on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) will need to connect their smartphone to a web-connected PC and utilise the PC companion application to download it.

Users who have already upgraded to ICS will receive a notification when the update (performance tweaks and bug fixes only) is ready and will be able to download it over-the-air (OTA).   

In related news, Sony also recently unveiled the Xperia SL, which sports the same design as the Xperia S, but is powered by a slightly faster 1.7 GHz Qualcomm MSM8260 dual-core processor. It is unfortunately not heading to local shores.