Late Feb, possibly early March. It won't be a long wait now. If you are having trouble getting the ICS update just wait it out for the JB update as it brings significant performance upgrades and many, many bugfixes. The ST-E platform tools are supposed to be awful, I think this is likely to be the last time Sony (or any other sensible OEM) goes to ST-E. Ericsson need to reconsider their direction and support levels going forwards.
As a side note - not a lot of people know this but back when Sony Ericsson were threatening developers and locking their devices down, it was the Ericsson half of the company that was driving that stuff. The Sony half was much more inclined to let it go and when the deal was struck internally that Ericsson would sell up, Sony basically took over management of the unit (which also coincided with better hardware and faster release schedules) so SE dropped all of the anti-developer action and reached out to them and basically put a white flag up. Ever since Sony have taken over Sony Ericsson (early 2011) they have made devices that people desire, have been open to developers, have reduced their time between launch and release, they have made a much bigger commitment to updates than SE originally looked to make (Sony drove through the 2.3 update for the X10i and 4.0.4 updates for the lesser 2011 devices).
That attitude of Ericsson still lives on in ST-E, everything is locked down, the developer support is poor, the help for OEMs is poor, they have absolutely terrible time to delivery (A9600 was supposed to be out in Q3 2012, where is it?) and no control on costs. Many blame the French government interference, but I put it down to Ericsson who have proven themselves wholly incapable of dealing with the huge pace of the mobile handset industry.
