Playstation Vita

The PS Vita (Playstation Vita) is the first true successor to the original PSP 1000 and is intended to take over the PSP line of mobile gaming devices. The PS Vita is very new to the gaming field and has yet to prove itself to both the gaming community and in sales figures. Released in North America February 22, 2012 and in Japan on December 17, 2011, it has only sold 1.2 million (approx.) units worldwide. It also launched with one of the largest amount of launch titles of any mobile platform.

With its many new features and vastly improved performance, the PS Vita is a force to be reckoned with on the mobile gaming front. While the DS series continues to focus on casual gaming, the Vita takes even bigger steps towards more hardcore mobile gaming. With a bigger screen, dual analog sticks and quad core processor, the Vita is superior to the DS in specs, but with a price tag of $250 plus need for proprietary memory cards, can the PS Vita compete?

Hardware

The PS Vita is, in all ways, a current generation mobile gaming platform fully prepared to take over the PSP's reign. It is equipid with a quad core ARM Cortex A-9 processor along with quad core graphics with its SGX43MP4+ graphics processor. It has 512mb of system RAM and 128 mb of system video RAM dedicated to the graphics processor. The PS Vita also takes a new type of proprietary flash memory called the PS Vita Memory Card coming in sizes of 4, 8, 16 and 32 GB.

The external hardware of the PS Vita is even more impressive than the powerful internals. The newest and best feature on the Vita is its screen. It has a 5" OLED touchscreen with a very high resolution of 960 x 544 bringing its pixels per inch (ppi) to 220 ppi, thats just under the iPads Retina display of 264 ppi. The PS Vita also has a rear multitouch pad on the back of the device for even more clicking and swiping options. The Vita has the standard D-Pad on the front left with the 4 arrow buttons along with the triangle, square, circle and x buttons on the right. It has the left and right trigger buttons, power volume and the PS Vita button. Also, for the first time on a Sony handheld device, it has dual analog sticks compared to the PSP's single analog nub.

Successors

The PS Vita does not have any forseable successors but there are a few devices out that could take the role. With the tablet and smartphone advances over the past 2 years (2010-2012), the idea of a mobile gaming device may be a thing of the past. For example, more people play games on their smartphones/tablets than on the Nintendo DS, PSP and PS Vita combined. Only Time will tell here.

Success

The PS Vita has yet to prove itself due to its recent launch, just 2 Months ago in the US at this writing. But, since its launch the vita has sold 1.2 milion models worldwide wich could be a sign things are going well. The PS Vita on the gaming front is extremely impressive, even to the hardcore gaming world. Playing games at PS2 quality on a handheld is something previously unheard of until now and the Vita does it very well.

Sources

http://www.ign.com/wikis/ps-vita

http://playstationvita.wikia.com/wiki/Special:WikiActivity

https://playstationdev.wiki/psvitadevwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page