Android fever appears to be in full swing these days with the recent announcement of 18 new Android-based phones and a large amount of Android netbooks that are expected to be released before and around this October. Now, Sony’s joining in the fray by stating that they will be including Android on their new Walkmans that should be appearing sometime in 2010. This will transform the Walkman into not only a music player, but also a device that can connect online, play movies, and surf the internet. I suppose one could say that this is similar in concept to the iPod Touch.
However, some are speculating how far Sony’s love for Android will go considering their desire to unify consumer experiences across the board. Sony’s recent Bravia TVs included the XMB interface as, of course, do the PS3 and PSP. And we suspect that the new Android Walkmans will be very XMB-esque in there appearance. Likely they will have the same icons and the same feel to them.
But here’s a far-fetched thought: could Sony be considering the Android platform to power the PS4 or even a new PSP? Android is an open-source platform that provides a basic Linux foundation and essentially mandates that all applications be written in Java. Sony could likely modify this reasonably quickly to have the Java interpreter running on the current Cell processors. This would make development quicker and easier, and might make it significantly easier for Sony to get something like Microsoft’s XNA started. The inclusion of Android would also go a long way towards Sony’s objective of unifying the experience across the board.
Now, many tech people will probably be quick to point out that Android isn’t meant for such a purpose, and I am certainly fully aware of this, but it might serve as a foundation on which Sony can build and that’s liable to be much faster and cheaper than building an interface and libraries from scratch. BD-J is already included in the Blu-Ray standard and that inclusion may not have been solely for the interactivity on the discs. Rather, it may have been included because Sony has been intending to transition away from their supposedly hard to code libraries (at least for the PS2, that is), to a cleaner, more elegant Java solution.
Far-fetched theory? Yes. But it might not be as implausible as you think…
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Tags: Bd, Blu Ray, Bravia Tvs, Cell Processors, Consoles, Consumer Experiences, Fever, Full Swing, Inclusion, Ipod Touch, Java Interpreter, Music Player, Netbooks, Open Source Platform, Ps3, Ps4, Scratch, Sony Tvs, Walkman, Walkmans, Xna
