[Xperia Arc Android Development] TheTen:
I'm by no means a power user, I don't know linux hackery and my geekness extends simply to wanting to have a smooth, sleek, powerful, useful smartphone...

So I am nothing short of thrilled to bits with this ICS release...

I have a sim-free XperiaArcS which I bought a couple of months ago for £200 in the UK. Prior to that I was a WinMo user for about 5 years and an iPhone user for 2.5 years. When I moved from WinMo to iPhone, I was severely disappointed by loss of functionality in calendar and contacts OTA syncing with Exchange, and by the lack of a decent home screen with news/email/SMS updates and 'widgets' (used to use SPB), but I quickly got used to working around the limitations and never imagined I could ever move away from iPhone again... Even now, I continue to use and enjoy the iPad2.

But after the 5.0 update to my iPhone3GS, I was introduced to a painfully irritating and unprofessional 'stutter' in my messaging notification sounds which drove me to want to change my dependable old iPhone.

However, in the years since taking on my expensive iPhone contract, as a self-employed businessman, I've experienced the blunt end of the recession, and take great care in spending money these days. I moved from O2 after many years, to GiffGaff, and put all my family members on GiffGaff too, spending no more than £10 per month on my phone usage instead of £50 a month with O2 (more if I texted a lot).

So in wanting to change my mobile, but wanting to save money, I got strangely attracted to Android phones through my Girlfriends GalaxyS. And I thought that as a 'put me on' until iOS6 or iPhone5, I would get the best specced Android I could find, for the cheapest deal I could get, so that I could sell it on when the new Apple offering tempted me back to the fruity side of life...

I window shopped for months, and my eye kept coming back to the Arc, and then in February I couldn't resist any longer, and bought the lovely piece of kit.

However, I always felt something was missing, and always struggled with making the move to a less visually accomplished and less smooth user experience. I tried installing each of the main launchers, and configuring each one, skinning it, and even stopped using the stock dialer and went with exDialer for the speed, slickness and the ability to access names in the phonebook through keypresses on the alphanumeric keypad instead of having to manually look up phone book entries in the stock Sony dialer. I stopped using the stock SMS app (kinda ugly) and went with GoSMS. But I was always wrestling severely handicapped performance using alternative launchers - ADW was the best of the bunch, but even then the lag was awful and sometimes resulted in crashes or severe graphical glitches.

So I was hoping beyond hope that the ICS that I was advised to wait for by the phone store salesman would indeed come eventually, and I was slowly getting frustrated until this week, thinking that ICS would elude me on the ArcS just as it is on my HTC Flyer (again, a salesman told me ICS was coming...)

So I was even more frustrated when I found out that ICS to UK was delayed.

Then I started reading up, and found out about the flashtool install method for the Nordic ROM, and temptation set in hard, and I even decided to risk my complex app configurations and data, to do the update. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I ran the flash with the 'erase user data' option deselected, not knowing what consequences to expect.

To cut a long story short, the phone updated as planned, data and apps intact, and the end result is that I've actually fallen in love with my ArcS completely... Smooth, reliable, fast, attractive. I love it.

I've now been able to root it also thanks to DoomLord and to remove some bloatware with Titanium Backup. Not sure what else 'rooting' is good for, but open to options as I learn more...

And with no data loss, or having to reconfigure my apps and accounts again, I couldn't be more thrilled!

In fact, flashing the new ROM threw up less problems than swapping out my SD card for one with bigger capacity, which totally flocked up my App2SD installations and required me to reinstall a whole bunch of apps. But now that the pain is over, and everything is back how it should be, I have a really, really lovely phone that I'm so pleased with...

I cannot even see that Apple, based on the past 4 years of watching the development of the iPhone and iOS, could even come close to producing an OS/hardware package which would ever tempt me back into their fold.

The most important phone features for me, quite simply, Apple does not cater for, and neither - sadly - does WinPho. I need a complex Exchange-syncing calendar app with me at all times, that handles Outlook/Exchange categories, and the combination of Android and Moxier Mail literally ticks all the boxes. If only Apple could have built that functionality in, or opened up their technology so that third party developers could produce viable alternatives to the stock apps... not to mention their lack of a configurable, non-widgeted set of homescreens... I still use my iPhone 3GS as a glorified iPodTouch, and I can't get over how antiquated it seems now. It still has a feeling of dependability and that it won't even hesitate to perform each app as requested, but it feels so outdated that it really does deserve to be consigned to being the OS of a PMP, not a smartphone.

I love my XperiaArcS!!!