Sony's vice president of home entertainment has revealed that we could see the introduction of the PlayStation 4 sooner rather than later. Hiroshi Sakamoto recently told Chilean website Emol that Sony is hard at work on the next generation PlayStation and that they are focused on E3 in June or perhaps even earlier in May.

Most likely wouldn't be terribly surprised to see the console show up at E3 but a May announcement would be significant as it would beat Microsoft and their planned Xbox 720 to the punch. It is widely expected that Redmond will unveil the successor to the Xbox 360 at this year's gaming event in June.

Announcing the PS4 a month earlier would most certainly net Sony more press coverage for their console, but of course that would work the same for Microsoft at E3 if the Xbox didn't have to compete with the PlayStation for coverage.

Neither camp has been forthcoming with details about their respective consoles which means everything we know about the two systems is based on rumors and speculation at this point. In November we heard rumblings that Sony was sending out second generation PS4 kits to game studios, codenamed Orbis. We were told at the time that a third generation kit would hit developers' hands sometime in January.

The PS4 will reportedly ship with a modified AMD A10 APU, either 8GB or 16GB of RAM, an optical drive for Blu-ray playback and a 256GB hard drive. Wi-Fi, Ethernet connectivity and HDMI-out are also expected to be included in the final revision.