Sony will be rolling out an update to Android 4.2 Jelly Bean shortly after they launch their new Xperia Z smartphone sometime in the next couple of months, likely in March. Talk Android reports that the news came earlier today on Twitter, during a company question and answer session.
When the Xperia Z hits the shelves, it will have Android 4.1 Jelly Bean preinstalled in the box, but Android 4.2 will come quickly after.
From Sony's Twitter account: "Xperia Z launches on JB 4.1, but will receive 4.2 shortly after launch. As always, we'll share more info on this over the coming weeks on the blog."
The Jelly Bean 4.2 update will bring some modest improvements over 4.1, like a more reactive user interface through touch-responsive CPU boosting, automatically resizing widgets, lock-screen widget options, and Android Beam, which is basically that "tap to share" feature that the Samsung Galaxy S3 boasted in its launch advertisements.
As we've reported earlier, the Sony Xperia Z will be a quite impressive piece of hardware to run Android Jelly Bean on, no matter what version you have. With a five inch screen capable of 1080p high definition resolution, a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor with 2 GB of RAM, and a 13 megapixel rear camera with 16x digital zoom, the Xperia is going to be a hot smartphone to have when it releases sometime in the next couple of months (it's being released in the United Kingdom on March 1st, so it's a safe bet that soon after it will land here).
It's also capable of being dunked in a bowl of water without being ruined, so that's pretty cool. No wonder it was the most talked about gadget at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.
Check back with us for more information about the Xperia Z's release date, as it becomes available.