The clock starts now for verifiable chatter about Sony's inevitably upcoming PlayStation 4, as the company has officially admitted that it's working on the PlayStation 3's successor.  Eurogamer has a quote from Sony's executive vice president and chief financial officer Masaru Kato regarding increased research and development costs made during an investor conference call.  It's a nebulous statement and offers no information about what we can expect from the PS4, but it is confirmation that the next PlayStation is on the way.

"For the home equipment the PS3 still has a product life," he said, "but this is a platform business, so for the future platform - when we'll be introducing what product I cannot discuss that - but our development work is already under way, so the costs are incurred there."

My only general hope for the PS4 is for Sony to take what made the PS3 so much fun and make it better.  Oh, and maybe doing away with the whole identity theft thing, too.  But seriously, there's plenty of directions for the company to take its next home console.  It'd be nice to see native 1080i visuals across all games (or even 1080p as long as I'm dreaming), larger hard drive space, larger in-game worlds exploding with extra detail. and better implementations of the web browser, video editor, and other widgets that seem a bit half-assed at the moment.  Progress marches on.