Why would someone that uses and abuses of custom Rom’s for he’s cellphones would buy a game console and that is no hackable (as we speak)?
I also don’t know yet. (my psp 1000 got downgraded 2 days after I bought it and never had the official firmware on it – Love homebrews and emulators, sorry Sony)
The main reasons that led me to buy it where the fact that I got an e-mail from sony saying that if I bought a ps vita until Deember 24th I would get a free memory stick of 8GB and secondly I got a great promotion on Black Friday.
Beside the memory stick I got Little Big planet, Assassins Creed Liberation and an Year of Playstation plus subscription for something around 200€. It would e completely idiotic to miss this promotion. The other reason that made me buy is the console specs, which are amazing.
As far a the buy rate, so far here is how classified it
Hardware: 9/10
Software: 3/10
Software ecosystem: 5/10
In detail, starting from Software ecosystem
The Software ecosystem right now is non-relevant. Most games are digital only, and the ones that have physical copy, most of them, are either at the same price as the digital only version or more expensive, just check amazon.co.uk and compare, for instance, the price of “Dungeon Hunter: Alliance” with the price of the psn store. There are to few games for a console that is already on it’s second year of existence. Many may claim that the titles specifically for the 3DS are also few, however, 3DS as 100% backward compatibility with NDS and DSi games. PS Vita has 0% compatibility with games from the psp that where bough in UMD format. Another big drawback for the vita ecosystem of software is the fact that it uses proprietary memory cards (that most of the time do not come with the console) that are overpriced. The big claim of Sony is that this action is to prevent piracy, but let’s face it. The main reasons why people are drawn to hacking portable gaming consoles is: 1. to get homebrews running, 2. to unlock the expensive hardware they bough and 3. the absurd price of games when they are released (to be addressed at another post). If Sony creates a store where developers can submit their applications (paid or free) and lower the price of the memory cards I’m pretty sure the PS vita would be flying of the shelves in now time.
Console Software
In one word we can define the biggest asset of the PS Vita: Multitask. And unfortunately this is where the advantages of the PS Vita software ends. The console interface is horrendous, really, please, give us back XMB from ps3/psp or at least allows us to choose the one we prefer. The own software of the console is very poor, mainly due to the fact that we are stuck with how Sony thinks we want to use our console. If developers where allowed to develop freely for the PS Vita and submit their work to a functional PlayStation store, by now we would have: file explorers, dvix video players, photo editing capability, and so on. The PS Vita has hardware to support all of this and much more.
Console Hardware
This is by far the biggest asset of the PS Vita and the main reason why I bough it. Let’s face it Sony, Vita will be fully hacked in the near future, and when that happens two things will come as a direct result:
1st: The PS Vita will fly off the shelves in no time.
2nd: We will have an incredible piece of hardware to do as we please.
p.s. the link in this section goes to the official specs of the ps vita (it was pointless to write them here)
Bottom line, this was a good Christmas present and when the PS Vita is fully hack or (I prefer this option) Sony decides to stop being greedy and give us the ability to run homebrews on the console it will be a great device.