Back in early March rumours arose that Valve were working on a ‘Steam Box' gaming console to outclass the proprietary formats used currently by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. These rumours were sadly shutdown a week later by Valve's Doug Lombardi, but the embers kept glowing regardless.

Recently in a podcast Gabe Newell admitted that Valve is looking to create an open hardware platform for the living room and mobile industries. This could potentially mean something like Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform where manufacturers license Microsoft's code and come up with their own hardware that adheres to rather strict regulations. Previous rumours suggested the hardware would include a Intel i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM and a Nvidia GPU.

Valve has not decided for sure whether it will pursue the lure of the console market, they are not even sure if they will be competitive in the area. Newell also spoke out against closed platforms saying that “they [Apple, Sony, Microsoft] build a shiny sparkling thing that attracts users and then they control people's access to those things,” and that it is “ominous that the world seems to be moving away from open platforms.” He later said that if the closed format society got to the point of no return, then Valve would step in a offer a open source solution.

KitGuru says: These rather open ended statements could mean a whole bunch of things, could Valve be looking to create their own mobile operating system?

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