Sony considering Vita operating system for future smartphones?

The PlayStation Vita is due to be launched in western markets towards the end of this month and Kazuo Hirai (Sony President & CEO-elect) has been making some interesting comments about the scalability of its operating system. He has hinted that Sony is exploring the use of the Vita OS in future tablets and/or smartphones according to a report from AV Watch.

The company wants consumers to view the platform as a mobile platform first and gaming platform second. Whilst Sony isn’t admitting that they are actively toying with the idea, they confirmed that the Vita OS has been built with “expandability in mind”.

There are plenty of reasons why the company might want to abandon its efforts on the Android space to focus on a proprietary OS. The Android eco-system is an incredibly competitive market. Sony (Ericsson) has a small market share compared against the bigger giants such as Samsung and HTC.

Differentiating your Android offering is key to winning this game and we’d argue that Sony Mobile are doing a great job here especially in terms of the frequency of updates and adding extra features into the software stack over and above the core Android offering. However, it may not be enough if it really wants to grow profits, especially given the razor-tight margins many Android manufacturers face.

Despite this, we just can’t see Sony abandoning Android any time soon. Sony has a loyal following, which should grow if the company commits to providing users both timely and worthy software updates. The current focus will be making sure the PlayStation Suite is released on PlayStation Certified Android devices in the next few months, which would also provide another key differentiator in the Android space.

We expect the Vita OS may be used as a back-up plan or even for a dedicated gaming smartphone at some point (the Xperia PLAY 2?) but apart from that we would hope Sony concentrates on porting Vita apps to Android, rather than trying to do it the other way around.

Via The Verge.