Tuesday, 7 February 2012

Sony PS Vita handheld

The new Sony PS Vita is set to debut on Feb 22nd and with a $50 deposit, you can reserve one. Now, I'm not much of a handheld gamer myself anymore with the exception of a little Angy Birds every now and again, but my 8 yr old son loves this stuff. Because of this, I've been scanning various reviews of the Vita as I'm sure it will be on my son's radar soon. I do however think that the Vita will encounter some of the same problems Nintendo's 3DS had coming out of the gate because it's just too expensive at $250 for the Wi-Fi-only version and $300 for the Wi-Fi+3G model.

One of the things that made the 3DS attractive enough for me to plunk down my hard earned dollars for was the drop in price back in August and the backward compatibility of the games.This meant my Son could still play his old games on the new platform. I don't know if this option is available between the Vita and past PSP devices but I do know that in today's mobile ecosystem of App store and Marketplace downloadable 99 cent games, paying $40 + dollars for premium games on a handheld systems is getting harder to justify.

Sony could take a few pointers from Apple & Android by making its downloadable games cheaper. Most downloadable titles (this includes older PSP games) should retail for less than $3. That's all they're worth in the new world of mobile games, and that's how you help build momentum for the Vita: you make it affordable for someone to build up a library of older PSP games while playing a few new "premium" titles...

But aside from Sony's pricing strategy, the PS Vita  is one solid piece of hardware...Its got a 5 inch touch screen with side controls and and graphical capabilities which approach those of the PS3. The combination of the Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU and PowerVR Series5XT SGXMP+ quad core graphics chip mean that this is running near PS3 quality games, helped along by the 512 MB RAM and a separate 128 MB of VRAM.
The system has some premium sports titles and once Call of Duty is released for this device it's sure to move allot of units. My son's birthday is in July, and hopefully if Sony drops the price a tad, releases a few good kid friendly titles and adds some cheap downloadable games, I might just consider pulling the trigger on the PS Vita...

RPM

http://www.pluggedin.co.uk/review/sony-ps-vita-expert-review









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