01.07.2008 — Sony has announced the replacement to its XL3 Digital Living System Media Center PC. The new product is the TP25, but don’t call it a Microsoft Media Center. You won’t see that term in Sony literature. Officially, it’s a “home theater PC,” even though it runs Media Center through Windows Vista Home Premium OS.

The XL3 and the entire category of “digital home PCs” were cleared from the Sony Web site last year, prompting speculation that Sony was dropping the Media Center platform. Not so, according to Sony Vaio product manager Xavier Lauwaert. He says, “We’re still very much committed to the category.”

As it happens, Sony “basically ran out of the XL3,” Lauwaert explains. “We were victims of our own success. Leaving a product out there [on the Internet] and saying ‘sold out’ is not a good idea.”

Lauwaert says that Sony is “refreshing the whole lineup” of its home theater PCs.

The TP25, expected to retail for about $3,000, maintains a living room form factor, but not like the XL3, which looked like an A/V component. The TP25 looks like an oversized hockey puck.

“We wanted to break the boundaries of form factor,” says Lauwaert. “Nowadays, there are more HDTVs in a house, so there’s less room for devices. We didn’t want to shrink it down to just a box.”

The TP25 adds support for two CableCard vs. the XL3’s single slot; however, with the new form factor, the TP25 requires an external CableCard box.

Lauwaert says that Sony is still interested in the custom installation channel, but the XL3 also will be available online because “that’s where the tech-savvy HD user is.”

The industrial design is cute, but will it fly in the custom channel, where rack-mount solutions are de rigeur?

Sony is also announcing a step-down Media Center, er, home theater PC, called the TP20, which will be about half the price. You can tell the difference between the two products because the TP25 is black, and the TP20 is white. The TP20’s “specs are pretty similar” to the TP25’s but it has less RAM and only one TV tuner.

Both units have Blu-ray disc drives and both support HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control), the technology that allows HDMI-connected devices to communicate two-way with each other.

As with virtually all CEC adopters, Sony’s CEC has its own name (Bravia Sync) and works only with Sony products. Still, it’s a nice feature that allows, for example, the HTPC to hibernate when the TV is turned off.

In other Sony Media Center news, the company does not plan to create a storage device based on the Windows Home Server platform. “We will have a home server but it will be running Linux,” Lauwaert says. “We’re committed to Microsoft operating systems on certain platforms, but we’re not married to it.

The new server, which is “not a NAS,” according to Lauwaert, will look like the TP25/20.