Sony has announced a pair of Android 3.0 tablets. The first is the 9.4-inch S1 media tablet (also known as the Qriocity focused) with a curved top similar to a folded book or magazine with both front and rear cameras. The S1 features a Tegra 2 SoC and customized “Quick and Smooth” touch panel UI with “Swift” web browser. As a bonus, it can also be used as a remote for your Sony gadgets, which is handy.

The dual-screen device looks like a sexed up 3DS. That’s the S2, which features a pair of 5.5-inch 1,024 x 480 pixel displays, Tegra 2 SoC, and a camera. It uses a custom book-style UI layout for the e-reader app, email and others. Both are PlayStation Certified and are WiFi and 3G/4G “compatible”. I can’t wait to see what Sony does with gaming on a tablet. How will these interact with the PS3? We should see a release in the fall, maybe sooner.

Sony has reason to celebrate when it comes to sales of its gaming hardware. The PS3 has reached over 50 million units shipped worldwide and the PS Move controller has shipped over eight million units. That’s a lot of gear no matter how you look at it.

These are categorized as “shipped” because Sony reports sales to retailers, not end users like you and me. Anyhow, those are still huge numbers. The PS3 is on fire.

In case you aren’t tired of Black Ops yet, some details of the new Black Ops Escalation DLC have been leaked by Game in Australia who accidentally published a new flyer for the content, which is supposed to be released on May 3rd. Oops.

This latest Black Ops DLC will be hitting the Xbox first as usual, then hit the PC and PS3 soon after. Black Ops Escalation will include 5 new maps, including one zombie game. Are you going to get this or have you had enough Black Ops now?

While the Xbox 360 is still outselling the PS3 in the US, new data from Strategy Analytics shows that globally, Sony’s console reached 43.4 million at the end of 2010, compared to 42.9 million for Microsoft’s system. Take that Xbox.

In comparison, the Wii’s worldwide installed base was 75.5 million at the end of last year. If you have been paying attention, global demand for Sony’s PS3 has exceeded that of the Xbox 360 for the past two years, and there’s no reason to think it will stop this year. Microsoft needs to keep innovating and build on the success of the Kinect to compete.

We reported earlier that “Anonymous” was not very happy with Sony and now we have word that the PlayStation Network and other Sony websites are having problems. A widespread outage, which started in Europe last night has now spread to North America.

On one hand Anonymous is claiming responsibility for the attacks, but Sony says that “sporadic maintenance” may cause PSN service to be interrupted throughout the day. Has the group already started their campaign against Sony, or is this just actual maintenance? Have you had trouble?

The hacking group known as “Anonymous” has announced that it will turn its attention toward Sony for the legal action it has taken against hackers for hacking the PS3 console. Not good news for Sony as we saw what this group was willing to do a few months back over Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

Anonymous wrote to Sony, “your recent legal action against our fellow hackers, Geohot and Graf_Chokolo has not only alarmed us, it has been deemed wholly unforgivable.”

Sony’s Crackle service has now received an update that will allow it to provide a full range of ad-supported full-length movies and television series to a variety of devices. The update will now stream content to the Sony PlayStation 3, Roku streaming players, Sony’s Blu-ray players, BRAVIA televisions and Streaming Player with wifi, along with Google TV. This is great for PS3 owners as it’s yet another thing the console can do, but we already have plenty of video streaming services.

You can find Crackle in the Channel Store on Roku, on the PlayStation 3 Internet Browser home screen and on all BRAVIA Internet Video devices including Sony Blu-ray players and BRAVIA televisions.

The number of Xbox 360 users who download games is on the rise. 55 per cent of all Xbox 360 users bought at least one downloadable game last year. That number is up from 43 per cent in 2009. Also according to data from market research firm EEDAR, 50 per cent of PlayStation 3 users and 43 per cent of Wii users are down loading games.

Those PS3 numbers are up from 42 per cent in 2009, with the Wii numbers up from 37 per cent. So yes, it looks like downloading digitally is on the rise. Should Gamestop be worried? Probably not yet, but they must be keeping a sharp eye on these figures.

The Xbox 360 is about six-years old. The PlayStation 3 and Wii almost the same age. Microsoft and Sony had said that their current consoles will have 10-year life cycle and it looks like they were pretty on target. A Wii 2 is even expected this year to compete with the 360 and PS3′s Kinect and PlayStation Move motion controllers.

Now we have word that Square Enix, makers of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest to name a few, are already planning to open a 100 staff studio in Canada next year. This way they will be ready for the next generation consoles and get their games out accordingly.

After selling 500,000 units of the Nintendo 3DS handheld on day 1 in Japan, Nintendo has hit another milestone. Amazon UK has announced that they have received more pre-orders for the 3DS than any other gaming console they’ve previously sold.

The Xbox 360, PS3 and the Wii all come in second to Nintendo’s portable glasses-free 3D gaming sensation. They didn’t reveal the exact numbers, but 3DS pre-orders were 20% higher than the PS3, 56% higher than the Wii and 255% higher than the DSi. Looks like the big N has a huge hit on it’s hands.

There won’t be a widespread PlayStation 3 shortage in Europe after all. Thank the gaming gods! You can also thank the Hague’s civil court of justice, who has just ruled in Sony’s favor in its dispute with LG, and ordered that the 300,000 PS3s that are currently seized by customs be released to Sony for distribution.

Apparently LG has also been ordered to pay €130,000 in legal fees. If the company doesn’t comply, it will face a fine of €200,000 per day until it does. It’s a win for Sony all around, but you can bet LG isn’t done with them yet.

Do you have a burning question about a PlayStation product? Well if you have a Twitter account then you are in luck and can find some answers. Just @AskPlayStation. It’s that simple. Although I wouldn’t bother them with questions about how to jailbreak your PS3.

Yep. @AskPlayStation is the official account for all of your PS concerns, questions and comments. They will give you assistance via tweets Monday through Friday from 9:30AM – 5:00PM PST and will even answer in real-time between the hours of 2 and 5 PST. Mighty nice of them.

Sony’s PlayStation Plus subscription just became more worthwhile with the new addition of online storage for game saves. It’s coming with v3.60 of the PS3 firmware, which we should receive tomorrow, March 10th.

You will get to save up to 150MB of PlayStation 3 game progress data in Sony’s make.believe cloud. That isn’t a ton of space, but these files are usually small anyway. Really the most interesting aspect here is being able to just put your account details into any PS3 anywhere and play your games.

Check out the Official WWE All Stars Arcade BrawlStick for Xbox 360 and PS3. Now you can lay the smack down with an arcade style joystick. This BrawlStick from Mad Catz features a redesigned ball top joystick and high quality concave action buttons for gaming precision.

Wrestling fans will love the graphics and you can get right into the game without having to manually configure the buttons since Mad Catz has already pre-programmed it. It will cost you $79.99.

At GDC this week Sony outed some impressive numbers: 41 million to be exact. That’s the number of PS3 consoles the company says it has sold worldwide. In 2010 the PlayStation store saw a 60 percent boost in traffic and a 70 percent boost in revenue from a total of 70 million PSN accounts.

That impressive stuff. And titles like Killzone and Call of Duty sure help. Playstation Plus doesn’t hurt either. To be clear, we are talking about 70 million PSN user accounts, 41 million PS3 consoles, and 80 percent of them are online. Sony has a lot to celebrate right now.