In an interview with develop-Online, Sony World Wide Studios boss, Shuhei Yoshida, has said that when Kaz Hirai took over from Ken Kutaragi as SCE head, his first order of business was to get moving on the next generation of Sony console hardware and to ensure first-party devs were on board in helping manifest the new hardware from day one, a move that has been a long time coming in the Sony R&D camp.

"The first thing Kaz said was, "get World Wide Studios in on hardware development"," Yoshida told Develop. "So he wanted developers in meetings at the very beginning of concepting new hardware, and he demanded SCE people talk to us."

When asked if that meant they were officially working on new console hardware, Yoshida emphatically answered "yes, we are undergoing many activities that we haven't yet been talking about in public. Some future platform related activities."

It's no surprise that they're already looking at new hardware development, most hardware publishers are always in R&D a long while before coming to market, but given Sony's insistence they're sticking to a 10-year life-span for the PS3, a statement like this is a bit out-of-left-field (he'll probably be scolded for it).