With Nintendo’s 3DS taking a nosedive, the time was ripe for Sony to finally step in and conquer the handheld gaming world. Then they announced prices for the various goodies to go with it, and, well, it was a nice idea while it lasted.
First of all, the battery lasts just three hours. THREE. HOURS. Secondly, Sony is pulling its usual stunt where if you want any memory for your system, you have to buy a proprietary memory card. This is kind of Sony’s thing, just like Apple screams in fury at the idea of using anything so pedestrian as, oh, a friggin’ microUSB port. They love rolling out proprietary media and memory standards hoping they’ll catch on and it’ll be the CD all over again, which it never is. Remember UMD? Or DAT? Or Minidisc? All Sony, all failures.
And, of course, to make you pay through the nose, they want $125 for 32GB of memory. Keep in mind, the whole idea of this system is to download games. I’ll just use the onboard memory, you say? There is none!
What makes this outstandingly stupid is the fact that smartphones are currently hijacking the mobile gaming market in a big way, and this is supposed to counteract that. We guess they’re hoping customers will be overwhelmed by the awesomeness of the system and willing to pay $500 to make it useable. Yeah, good luck with that, Sony.
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The writer of this article is very very stupid and uninformed
1. Battery life is 3 to 5 hours depending on use and last i checked the 3DS has the same battery life.
2. UMD was a format created just for PSP, it was never meant to be used by any device but the PSP. Mini disk was better than cassette tape which was its rival but cassette tape was cheaper than Mini disc and manufacturers love them some cheap stuff.
3. Other formats sony has helped develop are
CD’s, DVD’s, Bluray’s, 3.5 inch Floppy disk, DVCAM, HDCAM both used in camcorders by several manufactures but you didnt know that did you?
4. That price is based of conversion from Yen to dollars and thats not the case. Prices are not set based off conversion rates. If you convert the price for Wifi Vita you will also find its tremendously over priced compared to the $250 US price. You will have to wait and find out what the price will be in the US.
Gaming news is always happy when they get to rag on Sony. I dont recall these many articles in the gaming news industry complaining that Microsoft sold a proprietary hard-drive for the Xbox 360 of 20 gigs for 100 bucks.
@Common Sense
The prices are based on yen-to-dollar conversions. Will the prices be lower in the US? Possibly, but I’m skeptical. The entire function of proprietary media is to overcharge.
UMD was intended to be the portable video format of choice; the entire idea was that Hollywood would put all its movies on UMD. It didn’t work out that way.
DVCAM and HDCAM are professional formats, not consumer ones, and whether they were “hits” is debatable, but nice try.
Also, the floppy disk was invented by IBM. Sony had nothing to do with it.
In short, BACK! BACK UNDER YOUR BRIDGE!