Sony Says Next Console May Take Different Incarnations

The news adds little in the way of solid information about the closely-guarded project, but does shed some light on the design of the next console. Surprisingly, the company is apparently not considering a specific design; rather, it seems to leaning towards a scenario in which the processor would live in different consumer electronic devices that could handle multiple tasks, such as televison recorder, DVD player and game console. The cell processor, which is a joint-project by Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM, is tentatively scheduled to finish in 2005. Microsoft has been rumored to be considering a similar successor to the Xbox, which could record television and play games, but the Sony strategy appears to be even more ambitious. Kenichi Fukunaga, a spokesman for SCE, told Reuters "We're not thinking about hardware. The ideal solution would be having an operating system installed in various home appliances that could run game programs."