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Portables (Games) Sony Games

PS Vita Specs Announced 259

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)."
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PS Vita Specs Announced

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  • by whiteboy86 ( 1930018 ) on Saturday August 20, 2011 @06:21PM (#37157206)
    probably the most important spec. for me
  • by Darkness404 ( 1287218 ) on Saturday August 20, 2011 @06:21PM (#37157210)
    But will it be fun? Hardware specs mean nothing if there aren't any good games for it. Hopefully Sony learns from Nintendo's mistake and actually has a decent library of games. Still waiting on a non-remake or original DS game to play on my 3DS I got as a gift back in June...
    • by JackAxe ( 689361 ) on Saturday August 20, 2011 @07:05PM (#37157470)
      Your comment about the 3DS can be said about pretty much every console prior.

      A brand new system always requires time for developers to figure it out and more importantly to test the waters, so as to make sure it's worth investing in with original IPs, or pretty much anything that's not just a port.
      • Actually, two of the three "home" console launches last time around had a "killer title"; the PS3 had Resistance and the Wii had Zelda (and Wii Sports, I suppose). The 360 didn't really have one - Project Gotham 3 was probably the closest, but it did have a decent second wave of games that hit a few months after launch. Actually, if you look at the last handheld generation, the DS had Mario 64 and the PSP had Wipeout, Lumines and Ridge Racer.

        That said, the biggest problem for the 3DS (after the deficiencies

  • Shush, heathen! Look at the flashy pictures!
  • by CanEHdian ( 1098955 ) on Saturday August 20, 2011 @07:06PM (#37157472)
    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.
    • That won't matter. Everyone is a fan of Sony, so you'll just buy 10 of them in advance. If you weren't buying more than 3 you were probably a dirty game-copying pirate anyway, and the Vita's DRM will sense the evil in your fingers and use the last of its charge to give your location to Sony's team of Apache pilots and horror-movie schoolgirls.

    • by chrb ( 1083577 )
      After discussions with my iPhone owning friends, I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that the only people who care about user replaceable batteries are a small subset of nerds and engineers. IMHO, the battery - the part that will degrade faster than any other component of a mobile device - should be easily field replaceable. But nobody cares. Apparently, "real people" buy a new mobile device every 12-24 months, so a user replaceable battery is a pointless feature.
      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Saturday August 20, 2011 @08:40PM (#37157936)

        That's about phones, and in a country where essentially no one buys a phone without a contract. It's a cultural thing, folks in USA are used to paying a shitload of money in installments, but almost nothing in front. I believe it has to do with way finances are designed to work for individuals in USA, essentially slaving them to stable income, and encouraging debt that's just barely repayable.

        Go to some EU countries, or even third world and you'll see the exact opposite. That's why nokia is still the king of phones across third world - it's phones are actually honest to god cheap rather then "costs you an arm and a leg, but will cut them off slowly over 2 years as you pay its actual price".

        • Go to some EU countries, or even third world and you'll see the exact opposite. That's why nokia is still the king of phones across third world - it's phones are actually honest to god cheap rather then "costs you an arm and a leg, but will cut them off slowly over 2 years as you pay its actual price".

          this is it. nokia doesn't disable features like bluetooth file transfers and tethering on its phones like the others. because it sells directly to users. it charges a price people think fair for the phone and then people are free to pay a fair price for their network usage. in us, the cost of the phone and the network usage is all mixed up, hidden. you simply do not know how much you are paying to the device manufacturer and how much to the carrier. and this lack of transparency keeps the prices a bit high.

          • by jo_ham ( 604554 )

            Who disables tethering? If you're talking about the iPhone it supports tethering out of the box, always has.

            It does need bluetooth file transfer though - OS X can do it, so iOS can, it's just not enabled.

            • by toriver ( 11308 )

              But share to and from where? Most files on an iOS device are "owned" by each app. iOS 5 seems to introduce some "home" folders for music, pictures etc. so perhaps the home directory can have Bluetooth file transfer enabled...

              And yes, tethering or no tethering on an iPhone is up to the operator to decide, I have tethering from my operator but Americans on AT&T pay extra (as if bytes over tethering are more expensive or something).

            • iphone does not do tethering, i really dunno what you're talking about. also, it does not do bluetooth transfer. again, i don't understand the fucking point of you writing "OS X can do it, so iOS can, it's just not enabled." you could just have said, "you're right, other phones including iphone disable features on the request of operators."

      • Apparently, "real people" buy a new mobile device every 12-24 months

        Are your friends doing that? I've never had to do that with any iPhone. For one thing if you got Applecare and the battery were dead within three years, they'd replace it for free. But in reality battery life has never dropped that much even after two years of solid use on the older phones.

        Replaceable batteries are just pointless, since in the same (or possibly better) form factor, I can carry an external battery if I really need more t

      • by jo_ham ( 604554 )

        I replaced the battery on an iPhone 3GS last week - it took me 15 minutes. Not bad, since by having it totally internal the battery can be much bigger (no need for the battery door or battery bay, and you can make the case smaller).

        For something you only have to do *at most* every couple of years, I think 15 minutes is a reasonable trade off. The battery in my iPhone 3G is still almost as good as they day I bought it, and it will continue in its 2 year+ service in the hands of a family member.

        The replaceabl

      • Nice try, but the iPhone batteries don't actually noticeably degrade in 12-24 months, and even after 2 years battery life is still much better than the vast majority of other smartphones. If you really insist on keeping an iPhone for longer than 2 or 3 years, you can always replace the battery or have it replaced cheaply by the way, the warranty would have expired by then anyway.

        My 2 year old 3GS still gets around 48 hours on a single charge if I don't use it a lot, and even with the heaviest of usage it ne

      • whenever i have needed to change the battery on my phone, i just took it to the shop where they sell batteries and they change it for me. i neer have to do it myself. is this not possible with iphones? i doubt it.

  • Someone would eat the pandora's lunch. I can already hear those people that are still in line for the first batch stampeding to the vita, once it's jail broken there will be no need for the pandora.

  • Do this.

    Release the jailbreak yourself. Better yet, make a Linux distro and dev package for it. Bonus points if you make an X server for the graphics chip.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Indeed. But let's face the facts, this is sony. As their otherOS fiasco showed, they care about locking their consoles down far more then about giving their users freedom to install another operating system.

      Hell, it still has a proprietary non-volatile (storage) flash memory format, just so that they can cash in. Not (mini/micro)SD like most of the ultraportable hardware like mobile phones have.

      • They care about preventing piracy. Otherwise, the ps3 was the most open of any of the hardware this gen, with lots of standardized support (usb, bluetooth, sata hdd's). The PSV does support the PlayStation suite stuff, which is an android development framework in the works, so in theory you could make homebrew games that way.
    • yeah right, so every other teenage asshole can download the rip of the latest vita game and install it on his vita.
      forget it, piracy is a real threat to game consoles (unlike music) and sony have shown us that they will go to ridiculous lengths to thwart piracy attempts.

    • Officially at least.

      Why would any console maker in their right mind include it? People simply didn't use it on the PS3 (I'd be amazed if it got 0.1% of users using it regularly). Then you got people using it as a method of hacking into the PS3, forcing their hand to remove it. People then used it as (frankly stupid) justification hacking the PS3 to play pirated games and hack the PS3 servers.

      No mainstream console maker will ever include Linux or an ability to unsigned low level code again thanks to th
  • So there have been a number of articles [arstechnica.com] about how the 3DS (with an actual 3D screen) is having a hard time competing against the iPhone. Sony's entry? Basically the same specs as an iPhone 4 [wikipedia.org]. Yeah the Vita has a faster cpu and hardware buttons, but it also has a lower resolution screen and the games will be more expensive. Needless to say all the rumors point to a new iPhone being released in the next few weeks [appleinsider.com] which would probably close the gap on the cpu. Are hardware controls really going to sell $40 ga
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Vita games will also be about as comparable to iphone games in the same way as sex compares to masturbating with sandpaper.

      Seriously, there are maybe 10 games total worth playing on iphone, and that is a very optimistic view (+ badly working console emulators). Rest are designed for people with severe attention deficit disorder and are typically less interesting then old 8-bit nintendo games.

      They certainly do work for the masses that never gamed before however, as well as people who only play on the road in

    • playing games on iphone is like you gave a child a packet of m&ms. playing on the vita will (hopefully) be like eating at a lavish buffet.

    • The Vita is two or three generations ahead of the iPhone 4 in terms of specs.

  • All I ever did with my PSP was run emulators on it. Maybe someday I'll get the Vita, when my PSP finally goes tits up and I need a new portable emulation device.
    • by amiga3D ( 567632 )

      Exactly! If I can use that hardware I'll buy it. If all I can do is what Sony says it's okay for me to do with it then they can eat it. I love the hardware specs. It's exactly what I want to replace my nokia n800. The screen is absolutely perfect and the quad core arm is great too. Plenty of RAM for a handheld computer. I'd pay 500 bucks for that if it ran Meego or, with that hardware, some form of Debian.

  • That would be good! Imagine playing Gran Turismo 4, Dark Cloud 2, FFXII, etc while riding in the bus ! :) nuff said!
  • Decent... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DarkEdgeX ( 212110 ) on Saturday August 20, 2011 @09:28PM (#37158138) Journal
    ...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.
    • 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.

      That's exactly what it has, except we don't yet know if the second slot takes SD cards, memory sticks or something else.

  • Look! It's another word for "another stupid proprietary cable to put in your back pack when we could have used a micro-USB port and a TRRS head phone jack instead!

  • All that matters to end users is if the games play and look great. You are going to buy this if you want dedicated controls (the differentiation), not by processor specs. Why bother even releasing the specs unless it is just to gloat a little? This Vita looks pretty good for a dedicated device (not something I personally would buy).
  • This is essentially the same hardware as the iPad 2, but a bit better.

  • ...will it have some kind of "PSN required" function to play "offline" and single-player games? Will it silently snoop on my usage habits and report those habits to Sony and "partners"? Which firmware-encoded software functions will they later remove in the name of security?
  • ...as in, it'll be interesting to see how Sony manage to royally fuck up this time. Maybe the games will "expire" to make you re-buy them every so often?

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