PS Vita Specs Announced

An anonymous reader writes "Sony has announced the hardware specs for the PS Vita and the details have confirmed most fans' hopes instead of their fears. The heart of the system is an ARM-developed Cortex A9 chip with four cores and a PowerVR SGX GPU. The screen is a 5-inch OLED capacitive touch-screen (with multi-touch) and a resolution of 960 x 544. The system will include 512MB of RAM and an additional 128MB of discrete VRAM. There will be front and rear cameras capable of 60fps at VGA resolution (640 x 480)."

Re:Finally, something that doesn't record in 720p.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgive my ignorance, but does anyone know why so little RAM?

Any more and it would be beating the PS3. And, honestly, I'm not sure that I'm joking. I think that really may be why.

My real question is how they intend to deal with the lack of a UMD port while the thing's supposed to be backwards compatible with the PSP. I guess that feature's only useful for people who pirated their PSP games.

Fear Confirmed: non-replaceable battery

[CanEHdian]

This means that the life of your Vita will be equal to the life (as in: able to hold a reasonable charge) of your internal battery. I'm on my 3rd battery for my June 2005 PSP-1000, so this is not without precedent. I'm sure you'll be able to find specialist stores that will put in a new battery for you, but this won't be cheap.

Decent...

[DarkEdgeX]

...but still lacking. I'm sad to see they're going with a proprietary memory card for games. I was hoping, at worst, they'd have two memory card slots, one proprietary one for games, and a standard SD or MS slot for expanding memory. Also sad to see video out is gone (PSP had video out at least, and I was hoping for a mini-HDMI connection or possibly wireless HDMI (since the standard is almost complete IIRC)). Oh well... maybe next console generation.