Sony will enter the Android tablet arena before the summer is out, the Japanese giant's CEO, Howard Stringer, has revealed.

It will run Android 3.0 Honeycomb, he said, and ship in the US first, according to a Nikkei report mentioned by Bloomberg but not linked to.

Company executive Kaz Hirai said in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that Sony has a series of tablets in the pipeline, though until now there has been no indication of the operating system they'll use, or when they will surface.

Sony hasn't said anything about specs, though third-parties have speculated that the tablets will use Nvidia Tegra chips.

The Nvidia roadmap has a quad-core part out in the summer, so it's tempting to think that Sony is holding fire for that hardware.

It will also want to take some time to port its XMB UI on top of Android, and get its own app and content stores ready for the machine. ®

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