"Pffft. Forget about the PlayStation 3 (well, not really) - Sony is already looking ahead to its successor.

Never afraid to speak his mind, Sony's Ken Kutaragi, the man behind the PlayStation division, is looking to the future - the far future. While Kutaragi and the rest of Sony's engineers are hard at work hammering out the kinks in the PlayStation 3, the so-called father of the PlayStation is letting his mind wander to its successor.


"My dream, and the dream of all my team, hasn't finished," Kutaragi told the BBC recently. "In fact we haven't achieved even half of what we're going to do."

"We want to lead with the PlayStation 3, and beyond that to the PlayStation 4 within the next decade."

Of course, with the PlayStation 3 not even here yet, it's much too early for any concrete talk about the potential of the hardware that follows it. But it may just be something wholly new.

Earlier this year, at the International Games Summit in London, Sony's David Reeves spoke of Sony's vision for the future, where games are a small part of the content that flows through Sony's "games" machines - a term the company insists it has never used about the PlayStation 3.

As it stands now, Sony's supporters are anxiously waiting to see what the PlayStation 3 will be able to do, and whether the millions of pounds spent developing its Cell chip has been worth it.

There is currently no firm release date for the PlayStation 3, but it's expected to launch in Japan within the first half of 2006 followed by North America and Europe." [link]