A trio of 2011 Xperia smartphones won't be getting a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich on O2

Just when you thought the final twist in the Sony 2011 Xperia range / Ice Cream Sandwich update had been revealed, UK mobile network O2 has come along and added its own little postscript.

Owners of the Xperia Ray, Xperia Arc, and Xperia Neo on O2's network won't be receiving the upgrade to Android 4.0 (a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich). This is because of issues over stability that arose during the carrier's internal testing.

On its news blog, O2 confirmed that this trio of Sony smartphones would remain on the "very stable" Android 2.3 (a.k.a. Gingerbread) firmware.

"Unfortunately with the Xperia Ray, Arc, and Neo our testing found that the software update affected the phone's speed and performance," the blog post reads.

"These issues were present on three separate versions of the Android 4.0 software we tested and are caused by the software having more advanced hardware requirements than previous versions, as Sony explain on their site."

It doesn't require a huge leap of imagination to suggest that if O2 is encountering these problems with Ice Cream Sandwich at the lower end of the Xperia smartphone scale, then perhaps other operators will come to the same conclusion, too.

If you're an owner of an Xperia phone from 2011 and you're desperate for a refreshing Ice Cream Sandwich, it might be time to start thinking about buying a new device or tinkering with things you're not supposed to tinker with and installing a ROM.