Unlike some hardware manufacturers that have previously made things rather difficult for those of us who would modify their phones with custom ROMs and tinker about, Sony has been a pretty good supporter of the custom ROM community, allowing users to unlock their bootloaders and get in on the custom ROM action since April 2011.
However, what happens if you need to flash back to stock firmware, or you get sick of your custom ROM and just want to go back to la-la land? This is a problem that faces many of us modders — going back to stock firmware isn’t always straight forward.
To address this particular issue, Sony have now released a flashing tool that will easily allow owners of Xperia devices to return their software to a factory state. As you can see in the video below, the process is pretty straight forward.
At the moment, the tool supports the Xperia™ S, Xperia™ arc and Xperia™ arc S but Sony are planning to add support to more devices going forward. Further, Sony plans to offer a selection of firmwares for each device, for example allowing a user to select between a Gingerbread, ICS or Jelly Bean ROM (depending on availability for each handset, of course).
Now, will other hardware manufacturers follow suit? It seems unlikely, but we’d love to see a greater support for our ‘open’ handsets in the form of easily available stock firmwares so we can revert when/if we break things…
