Back in December last year, Sony released an alpha version of the Ice Cream Sandwich update for a few of their devices, in their new focus to work closely with the unofficial Android development community, followed by such releases for more and more of their devices, so that users could try out new updates without waiting.

However, Sony back then simply gave a warning that doing so would be at the owner’s risk, and didn’t provide a way to go back to an official firmware. Well, that isn’t the case anymore, as Sony has now released an official flash tool for flashing back to standard Sony software, which will be welcome news for those who flash custom ROMs on their devices often.

Now, an unofficial flash tool that allows flashing stock firmware and kernels, made by the development community, has been around for a couple of years already, but an official tool goes a long way towards showing how much Sony is willing to work with the development community instead of against it (I’m looking at you HTC and Motorola), and should be more stable as well.

The flash tool is currently in beta stage and only supports the Xperia S, arc, and arc S, though support for more devices will be made available in the future. You can try out the tool right away by visiting the Flash tool installation page on Sony’s website (which has the instructions for installation as well), at least if you own one of the three supported devices. Keep in mind that flashing the stock software on your device using the tool will wipe all the data from the device, so don’t forget to take a backup. Oh, and you’ll need to have your device’s bootloader unlocked as well.

Check out the official video for the flash tool below.

Via: Sony