Sony Ericsson: No More SEUS Updates For Unlocked Bootloaders

Sony Ericsson's announcement that it would start offering a service to unlock the bootloaders on certain Xperia models came as great news. While there are a lot of restrictions for what devices qualify, it's a huge step towards opening up the company's hardware for Android enthusiasts. One thing that wasn't clear at the time would be how the unlocked bootloader would affect normal software updates. Sony Ericsson has since confirmed that once you unlock your bootloader, you'll no longer be able to update through its SEUS tool. 

Earlier, the company had said that even if your bootloader was unlocked, so long as you had the current, official SE ROM on your phone, it could still receive OTA updates or use the SEUS (Sony Ericsson Update Service) software tool. It has since retracted that claim, saying there's no way for it to safely distribute such updates when it can't be sure just what software is running on your Xperia. 

Of course, you can always wait for a ROM to be dumped of a post-official-update Xperia, then flash that to your phone manually, but there's no official pathway. Such a tool may be released in the future, but Sony Ericsson hasn't committed to it yet. 

Source: Xperia Blog, XDA-Developers forum (1, 2)