After going strong with Google for almost a few months now, Sony announced today that the Xperia S-Android Open Source Project experiment is changing hands. The project has been on the main branch of the AOSP since it started back in August, but now Sony is taking the lead on it and moving the project to a Sony git on GitHub. The reasoning behind the move is that while Google employee Jean Baptiste-Queru considers the experiment a success, the Xperia S won't remain as a target device of the main AOSP branch as of Jelly Bean MR1 (Android 4.2). Since there is community interest in the project, Sony will be taking control of it and will be leaving it open for contributors to add to.
Sony today also provided an update on how the Xperia S-AOSP project is going. The device now boots AOSP and has a working SD card slot, Wi-Fi support and sensors. Sony has also gotten the audio and modem components up and running, but they utilize proprietary binaries that the company can't publish now. Next up in the plans for the experiment are to replace previously-published binaries with some source code and to get Android 4.2 going on the Xperia S.
While this experiment isn't one that will earn much attention outside of the hardcore Android fan/developer crowd, it's still pretty great to see that the project is still progressing and that Sony is now going to be taking the reins and keeping things going. The company has posted a video showing an Xperia S booting up a plain version of Android, connecting to a Wi-Fi network and accepting a phone call, and it's definitely a clip that's worth watching to see how far the project has come so far. You can find the video below.
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