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Japanese consumer electronics giant Sony is reportedly rolling out pre-release beta builds of its Marshmallow ROMs to a number of premium Xperia smartphones. The company has already released Android Marshmallow to a bunch of premium smartphones and tablets, including the Xperia Z5 range of handsets, which were launched late last year at the IFA trade show in Berlin, Germany. Of course, the Z5 smartphones are not the only Sony devices to be blessed with the latest commercially-available major version of Android. Along with Sony’s latest premium devices, the Xperia Z3+ smartphone and the Xperia Z4 tablet have both seen Marshmallow as well, so it was only a matter of time before the company started working on updating some older Xperia devices to Android 6.0.
Coming to the devices which now look likely to be the next in line to get the Marshmallow treatment, reports claim that the Xperia Z2, Z3 and Z3 Compact are the three smartphones which have started getting the beta version of Marshmallow rolled out to them. Obviously, as is the case with any beta-test program, the software is not available universally, but only to a select few who had signed-up willingly to be a part of the beta-test program, when Sony announced its ‘Xperia Beta’ program last month for residents in Italy, Spain and Netherlands. The latest Marshmallow ROM comes with build number 23.5.A.0.486, and brings along Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, which is the latest version of Google’s mobile operating platform, not counting Android N, currently in preview.
It’s worth noting here that the version of Marshmallow rolled out to the Xperia Z5 handsets is Android 6.0, which is technically a notch older than the version that’s now being tested on the Xperia Z2 and Z3 handsets. That being said, the beta firmware being rolled out does not apparently have the latest security patches unlike the Marshmallow ROMs for the Xperia Z5 handsets, which come complete with February security patches as expected. Instead, the beta ROMs come with security patches from December, 2015, so Sony does have some catching up to do on that front. While not all of the changes are catalogued, adoptable storage seems to be a notable omission from the new update, and there’s no telling if Sony plans to introduce this vital Marshmallow feature by the time its ready to roll out the stable version at some stage later this year.
