It’s pretty clear Samsung is keeping Bada/Tizen around as a possible future escape clause in case Android and/or Google goes nuts. Sony doesn’t have an alternative to Android – which it may need soon, since its Android smartphones and tablets aren’t doing particularly well. As such, Sony’s new CEO Kazuo Hirai has hinted that the operating system of the Playstation Vita may make its way to smartphones and tablets.
The Playstation Vita hasn’t seen much coverage here, considering it’s a gaming device and we rarely cover gaming. So, to recap: it’s Sony’s latest handheld gaming device, which runs a mystery operating system the web apparently knows little to nothing about. The graphical user interface – ugly as it is – is called LiveArea.
Beyond that, though, little appears to be known about what operating system is actually powering the Vita. I’ve been searching around, but couldn’t find anything. Since it’s a high-end gaming device, the operating system’s lower levels should be able to give very close and unfettered access to the hardware for optimal performance and latency.
As far as I know, there’s no source code release or people asking for source code, so I’m assuming it isn’t running Linux – but I could be wrong. A partial translation of a Japanese interview with Hirai says something about being built from scratch, but there’s no indication what was built from scratch; the entire operating system, or just the userland? There really is very little information available, so if any of you has information or links or whatever – please post a comment.
In any case, the Vita operating system has been built with expandability in mind, according to Hirai. “If you’re asking if we’ve made it in a way that’s expandable, so that it’s possible to apply to smartphones and tablets on top of achieving the high responsiveness we need for gaming devices – it is possible,” Hirai told reporters, according to Japanese Web site AV Watch, “That doesn’t mean that we’re applying it to smartphones and tablets at this point in time, but it’s been designed with expandability in mind.”
While Android itself is doing pretty damn good, it’s mostly Samsung and to a lesser extent HTC that’s reaping the benefits. Sony’s phones haven’t been doing particularly well, so the company may be looking at alternatives. While most of us would want to see someone – for the love of god, someone – take on webOS, I’m equally excited about the possibility of Sony releasing smartphones with a custom operating system.
They do need to hire a few UI designers, though. Really. I’m available. Even I could do a better job than this.
No idea about the OS, but in the past Sony has used source from NetBSD in several products.
They’ve also been known to use the ELF executable format on several of their gaming platforms, like the PS2 and PS3 (..and apparently the PSP).
Edited 2012-02-13 22:42 UTC
The TRON lineage of OSes (which is mostly non-existant on OSAlert) is very popular on japanese embedded devices.
I could have been the basis for Sony “from scratch” efforts.
More infos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project
OLD: http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/31855.html
Not to be nitpicky, and sorry if I seem that way, but in the sentence:
“In any case, the Vista operating system has been built with expandability in mind, according to Hirai.”
Should Vista operating system be Vita operating system, since we’re talking about Sony and not Microsoft?
Sony’s issues have nothing to do with their choice of OS and everything to do with their habit of overpricing their product and their habit of crippling their offerings with their control freak nature.
Case in point, they practically invented the E-reader, and could’ve owned the market for them almost entirely… if their prices weren’t half again above the competition. Or look at the minidisc, fantastic audio recording tech completely crippled by idiotic DRM schemes
Edited 2012-02-13 23:21 UTC
Kind of like the PS3 game syst–, er, I mean relatively inexpensive Blu-Ray Disc delivery media, that was released at a whopping five hundred and ninety-nine dollars, which is ridiculous for a gaming system. But well, its controller featured a last-minute rip-off of Nintendo’s next-generation controller, basically a home game console controller version of Kirby Tilt & Tumble for the Game Boy Color, but hey… the Giant Enemy Crab *must* have made the whole thing worth it! I wonder what other real battles they had over there in Ancient Japan.
Edited 2012-02-14 01:04 UTC
And it still cost them $100 more to produce that device… Ridiculous, isn’t it? But again, PS3 was always a very good device. Much better engineered than XBox.
That’s not saying much. The first 360 did have what? a 68% or so failure rate out of the 32% yield that actually made it to customers.
Meh… I have a clear bias against Sony (couldn’t you tell?
) and I have since the PSX days, so I can’t agree: I hate the company and wish only for the absolute worst to happen to them. Yes, I hate them possibly even worse than Microsoft. I guess their hardware would actually be as impressive as it seems on paper… if you could use it as you see fit.
But with the sizzling battle between geohot and Sony, as well as the pathetic lawsuit against him for publishing–OMFG–the PS3 master key; not to mention the government-granted subpoenas for Sony to access all IP addresses of those people who viewed his web page (me included
), his “The Light It Up Contest” joke music video directed at Sony, etc., etc.
Both are shitty, assholish, anti-competitive and non-innovating companies. I’ll take Nintendo any day. Both companies probably *wish* they were half as innovative as Nintendo has been over the last several decades when it comes to gaming.
Still… as much as I hate what Microsoft has done to computing in general, I will buy their gaming system over Sony’s any day. Hell, I’ll just run Linux or something else on all my machines… and I do. I was set with my Android phone from LG (Optimus V), until later on when they decided it’d be a great idea to succumb to Microsoft’s empty patent threats, so I guess for the next phone I’ll have to further research to decide on what brand to get.
Edited 2012-02-15 06:35 UTC
Oh… and I almost forgot…
http://www.soldierx.com/bbs/201101/Geohot-releases-PS3-master-key
Old news, but enjoy… LOL.
Edited 2012-02-15 06:44 UTC
Sony is comprised of retarded control freaks, but they do make quality hardware….
So you hate Sony, seemingly largely for not being able to “use [their hardware] as you see fit”…
…and then you endorse Nintendo (“innovative” and largely using the same few franchises for the last several decades), which has quite similar stance to Sony with its consoles. Which BTW tried to essentially block (nowadays Apple style?) Sony work & innovation (during their cooperation 2+ decades ago) which ultimately led to PS1.
BTW, Sony gave up part of console market to assure Bluray win in the format war, it seems this turned out good for them (and for us, protracted format wars never were a good thing for consumers)
Let’s hope sony doesn’t follow the usual pattern,
Great hardware, but average software and shitty marketing.
Doesn’t matter… the PS Vita is gonna be an awesome emulation device, and will be most interesting once it is jailbroken, and I can play Robotron and Mr Do on it
As long as you don’t care about not playing recent games or being online with it. And emulation is already available on smartphone, so beside physical button (which I also find a big plus), what would be the advantage of the Vita ?
One thing that buggered me was the presence of looooong loading time (I admit it was with the demo unit), but I was hoping that the switch to cartridge would have mitigate that.
Well, with the PSP, it was possible to do both. But even if not, it’s a decent tradeoff, since 95% of modern games are ass anyway. It looks like for the most part, they’re just trying to shoehorn PS3 games on the Vita. I didn’t want to play these games on the PS3, and I don’t want to play them on the Vita either.
Having physical controls is a HUGE plus, and pretty much the main draw. Plus, you don’t have to drain the battery on your phone while playing games.
95% or more of all-time games (or of pretty much anything, really) “are ass” too …we just quickly forget this strong majority.
Yeah but the difference is, back in the ‘good old days’, the games that were ass didn’t get much attention. I mean, you had Space Invaders, and 500 Space Invaders clones. These days, you can wrap up a shitty game in a decent story and people still pay $60 for it, and are none the wiser.
In the “good old days” no games were given much attention (well, mostly apart from moral panics – what the bad influence on the youth might be – and such), comparably.
Plus “back in the ‘good old days’, the games that were ass didn’t get much attention” is perhaps not even strictly true, either – for one, wasn’t the Video Game Crash of 83 brought also by some very anticipated, very visible flops? Plus: most of the games we were absolutely thrilled about in the past really weren’t that good (wrapping up a shitty game into, then, novelty I guess?), they are rightfully forgotten. Or what about Pong mania?
And now all (also good) games became much more visible even just because their whole medium and its acceptance exploded …which seems to be what we (well, most of the “misunderstood gamers” of the past, I suppose) wanted, I guess – even if without full understanding of the implications (for instance, that of gameplays becoming more approachable for the “masses”)
I’m not sure your examples support your premises. It was a bit more complex for those two.
What took over the e-reader market roughly follows razor business model.
Sony e-readers are, coincidentally, among the most open ones …and, really, also hardly more expensive than most of other options, from other “independent” (not tied to specific e-book shop) manufacturers – while doing no worse in the market than them, perhaps better.
Minidisc came out when the market at large was really just starting to (seriously) adopt the CD – I imagine it made hardly any sense, for most, to get MD before CD.
After getting the latter, MD still made hardly any sense in “stationary” (or, to some degree, car) usage scenarios – but for portable usage it had to compete with inexpensive & well established cassette players. I don’t think any DRM considerations really played a role, they were hardly visible at the point of purchase vs. hellishly expensive, in comparison to cassettes, costs of (I guess) the just-introduced micro-mechanical MD complexity (Sony wasn’t the only one making MD players, you know; they were all similarly expensive).
And when MD players approached reasonable prices, it was already too late – even more inexpensive flash-based digital audio players started appearing (which also quickly surpassed MD players on most relevant fronts – not very hard, MD wasn’t that fantastic)
Generally, bashing all things Sony keeps being trendy… (not like there aren’t some “bad” things with this quite loose consortium, but…)
…happened to Sonys Xbar GUI? Thats one of the best interfaces for small devices…ever!
Those bubbles…look like a parody of old nintendo games! They must be!
I had a first generation PSP, which I used as a movie player. The UI was attractive and easy to use. It was also far more responsive than my Android HTC Hero.
Those bubble icons in the screenshot look terrible.
agreed and it isn’t any better in the flesh so to speak. The Bubble UI looks like something from the early 2000’s, it’s pretty dire and looked quite disjointed.
I agree that the xbar was the easier UI on any console or media player and when you look at media players such as Windows MCE and Apple TV they pretty much adopt the same thing (i know MCE has been out longer than the sony xbar) left and right, up and down, it works well.
Sony is forever trying to foist crappy (and unwanted) new formats on customers. If they treated their customers as welcome partners instead of the enemy perhaps they would do better in the market. Their track record is so bad I (and many others) won’t even consider buying their gear. Sony needs new leadership that will listen to what the customers want then do their best to supply it…without yet another un-needed format.
Yep. New format. Like their ps memory card and now, ps vita memory card..
Why not using the standard format like SD/SDHC/etc? The and answer is.. Well cause we want it that way.
IMO, This is a good read about Sony” http://goo.gl/94ol1
Yeah… Betamax (the popular mythology even goes that it was technically superior to VHS), CD, S/PDIF (what do you think “S” means?), Hi8, miniDV, HDV, DVD, Bluray, FDD (what is to the fullest degree the FDD, 3.5 inch one), Betacam, DAT (the last two embraced by professional setting) …all crappy formats nobody wanted. Sooo bad track record.
You remember some of their failures more vividly only because of the obvious perceptive bias, how failures remained exclusive to Sony and hence more associated with Sony, vs. many widely adopted standards which Sony introduced (or co-introduced). And Sony seems to have them more than others because they do a lot – in fact, you probably can’t avoid compensating Sony for their technological contributions, consumer electronic are only part of what they do, there’s also manufacturing robots, components (among them CCDs, LCDs both mobile & large, batteries), chemicals; and do you avoid music, movies or television coming from Sony-owned entities, or made on their equipment?
Oh, and pretty much everybody has their own cartridge format in gaming systems that use them; there’s no point in interoperability here – in fact, physically standard media can only bring confusion (or even damages to equipment – try putting Slot A Athlon into Slot 1 motherboard, it can be done in many cases …just “reversed”).
But hey, at least tonny et all can bash Sony some more (and PS memory card came out in 1994, there was no alternative then …and PS2 had a goal to be compatible)
Edited 2012-02-21 00:19 UTC
Browser is still Netfront, the same engine used on the PS3 and PSP, if they think they can win people to an OS with that browser, they are crazy. I understand they do not want to use Webkit or Gecko for licensing reasons (not that I agree with that) but please license Opera, Netfront is a browser engine for the dumb phone era
Netfront uses webkit now (the 3DS browser uses Netfront AFAIK) and Sony is moving in the same path as well. See the latest firmware update for PS3 and the improvments in the web browser.
Still, to stay on topic, Sony can follow one thing that RIM is trying to do and which has promise: integrate Dalvik and use it only to run Android applications with a thin compatibility layer to expose the relevant HW functions to Dalvik. Sony has enough experience with Android and internal software developers to pull it off.
This is where I consider Open Source software superior. Google may turn nuts in the future, may close the source code of Android and became a bad open source citizen.
But Android is open source now. If Google goes nuts any other company can made an Android fork with the last open source version available from Google.
“Open source reduce the risk if the main software vendor goes nuts.”
So, there is also another alternative that is to fork Android.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/21/2651242/playstation-vita-screens…
The UI needs more of this.
The few japanese characters which I can read make things even more crazy
You can noticeably find “Moooooo”, “Kawaii” (“cute”), what looks like the end of a “Kawaiiiiiiiiiiiii” (“cuuuuuuuuuuuute”), “Aaaaaaa”…
Kazuo Hirai has recently said the company is going to diversify and give more focus to software and services.
What Sony is going through is what most of the worlds top tier electronics firms is going through.
This is probably why they are now going to license Playstaton to HTC and others while not long ago they would not do this.
Samsung’s LCD unit is struggling. Philips almost totally sold it’s LCD unit but kept a stake in it.
Hitachi pull the plug on LCD manufacturing and Pioneer that used to make the best display units ever totally ceased that business.
This is a sign of the times that manufacturing is so yesterday profit wise. a Low margin, competition saturated business. With all the competition the real business is on branding, licensing, developing and selling cutting edge hardware for early adopters.
My personal experience with Sony is that it is a wonderfull company to deal with.
This is why I love Sony.
Not only will they sell to the small guys but there products, history of innovation and value is superb.
No snobbery like some of the others with many distribution channels.
The earthquake has contributed to it’s 2.8 Billion loss but I hope they will bounce back soon.
Edited 2012-02-14 22:24 UTC
Sony as a hardware company is awesome. Their design ethic rivals if not surpasses even Apple in certain respects. Sony as software and services company sucks. They have no idea what they are doing, are usually hell bent on locking down everything into some form on proprietary format, and they have no focus and direction.
Sony was an awesome company back when they were just about electronics, once they bought a media arm and became part of that industry, everything that made the company great go pushed aside.
Hell Steve Jobs took HIS design ethic from Sony. He admired their attention to design and detail and tried to build Apple around that ethic. In-terms of hardware Sony is hard to beat but what Apple understands that Sony doesn’t get is that the software is part of the widget too, its not an afterthought tacked on to great hardware. Great hardware is shitty with bad software, mediocre hardware can be great with great software. The iPhone spec wise is no match for Android devices, but the software is tailored made for the device and outperforms far beefier hardware.
Sony has a weakness when it comes to their software. Their best developers this generation are not even japanese. If I were Sony I would import developers from the West to develop their OS.
As it stands the Vita UI is fugs (fucking ugly).
I think they make good software also.
Acid and Vegas Pro software is very good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Foundry
“Sonic Foundry is the former developer of various media software suites,which were purchased by Sony in late 2003 for $18 million in cash and the assumption of certain liabilities and obligations”
That sounds like a bargain to me. Company must have had lot’s of liabilities.
Edited 2012-02-15 00:59 UTC
Sony’s android UI is hideous no wonder their phones aren’t selling, compared to iOS, HTC Sense and WP7 their UI looks like its been ported from a feature phone (it most likely has) and the UI of Vita isn’t very promising either. I always liked the XrossMediaBar (XMB) interface of the PS3 and PSP it was clean, modern, fast and minimalist it would look and run brilliant on phones and tablets IMO.
My budget was limited when I started my budget phone research. Sony was one of the most over priced/expensive phone against the phones from Samsung, LG and HTC and I settled on Samsung Galaxy. For my wife I still purchased SONY Xperia phone however I am disappointed with their Android strategy. I have received 3 firmware upgrades to my Samsung Galaxy phone but Sony has not released yet a single firmware upgrade!
Sony days are over, they used to give premium quality products like — TV, Music System, Home Theaters, Walkmans, Camera’s and people used to buy them at higher price because of quality, features and class… now Samsung, LG offer the same quality, Class at reasonable price why one will buy SONY?