The DualShock controller design is one of the most iconic pieces of hardware in video game history. Playstation fans will be excited to hear the news that Sony has found a way for their Xperia mobile devices to work natively with their Playstation 3 DualShock 3 controllers over Bluetooth. 

CES is less than a week away, so as is customary during the days leading up, we are starting to see products appear well before companies have a chance to announce them. The first two are from Sony, a couple of smartphones that may headline the show, unless LG steps up to answer to a massive New Year’s Eve rumor. 

In a recent interview, one of Sony’s marketing executives Dennis van Schie, said that the next Xperia flagship phone will be coming to CES and Mobile World Congress in 2013. Whatever this next step in the Xperia line is, Schie says it will easily be able to compete with the Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5. 

According to a report out of Android Noodles, a document showing the winter roadmap for Japan’s Docomo, lists out three (3) different Nexus devices. The three manufacturers on their list are Samsung, LG, and Sony. The report mentions a 3-column table that references the three devices, however, no picture or further proof was provided. 

For years there has been a battle between AOSP fans and manufacturers to hack vanilla Android (or something close to it like CyanogenMod) onto devices instead of the manufacturer’s version of Android. The difficulty with this battle is that it takes a tremendous amount of work to get another ROM working on a device. A developer cannot simply take AOSP Android and load it onto a device because stock Android is actually designed to run on a specific device (currently the Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, or Nexus 7).

Jean-Baptiste Queru, the technical head of the Android Open Source Project, wants to experiment with how AOSP works. Starting with the Xperia S, Queru has invited the community to experiment with porting AOSP to the device. “In theory, AOSP is designed such that it should be possible to plug in the files related to additional hardware targets,” said Queru in a Google Groups post. “In practice, that has never happened.” 

Well, today just took a turn for the kick ass and righteous. Glu Mobile, publisher of many other popular game titles on Android have released Call of Duty Black Ops Zombies to Google Play. The game features the maps and weapons that made it such a huge success among console gamers such as Kino Der Toten and Ascension.

Before you make a mess of yourself though, know that the game has been released for support of only Sony Xperia devices for the next 30 days. Once that period of time is over, everyone else can also enjoy the zombie slaying for a hefty $7.

Play Link ($6.99)

With no support documents to be found, we have visual proof that Verizon’s Sony Xperia PLAY is receiving an update to Android 2.3.3.  It for the most part sounds like bug fixes, but won’t know for sure until we see documentation.  For now though, if you own one, jump into Settings>About phone and try and pull it.  Should be there!

Build should be 3.0.1.E.0.88.

Cheers Eric and Legion!

If you were up late with us on the west coast last night, then you might have seen our tweets about the Xperia Arc launcher that showed up over at XDA.  A better-than-average launcher that allows for some nice customization in the dock (including folders), some sort settings in a transparent drawer, and a really cool preview page of all of your screens’ widgets combined.

Should work on almost all devices including the DROID franchise (pics taken from my DROID X).  And yep, works on all non-rooted devices as well.