After many speculations as to when Sony plans to bring out their new console, not to mention their recent announcement of the release of their PS Vita, it comes as a surprise to hear that the PlayStation 4 is apparently intended for launch in 2012.  That's next year, within a year of having already released something new (the PS Vita).

According to DigiTimes, Taiwan-based partners and component makers have stated the PS4 will be in production "at the end of 2011 for launch in 2012", and will even feature "body movement-based control like Kinect".

The assembly of the PS4 will be undertaken by Foxconn and Pegatron Technology, who will be filling in a planned shipment volume of at least 20 million units.

It's hard to believe this will actually happen, since there was no word of any of this at the E3 convention last month. Assuming this is true, when you consider the very recent PS Vita announcement, however, Sony could very well have planned not to make a big deal of it right away so they wouldn't bring down the hype around the Vita's appearance.  By releasing next year, they'd also be directly competing against Nintendo's pending release of the Wii-U.  The seemingly back-to-back PS Vita & PS4 releases would also help with forgetting the past few month's-worth of hacker-based issues Sony's been dealing with; new gadgets make gamers something-something.  We'll all know soon enough.