PlayStation Vita

Basics=

Sony's successor to the PlayStation Portable, codenamed the Next Generation Portable or NGP for short. It debuted at the beginning of 2011 in a private press conference by Sony and the official name (Vita) was bestowed to the system at E3 2011.

With their two most recent systems falling below expectations in terms of sales, they decided to pull out all the stops with:


 * Instead of using the highly custom console technology that the PlayStation 3 uses, the Vita uses common smartphone technology. This makes game development easier, considering most developers are already familiar to the technology and they are able to use assets from existing hardware ranging from home consoles to smartphones. Sony later announced the PlayStation Mobile program allowing for cross-platform development between the Vita and certified Android devices; the initiative was short-lived, however.
 * This is the first widely-available dual analog handheld, addressing a flaw experienced on the PSP.
 * In reaction to the growing casual downloadable game market (such as iOS and Android), Vita features are similar to smartphones, such as a touch screen and motion sensor.
 * The Vita is Sony's first system to use flash cards instead of optical disks for game distribution, which hopefully removes long loading times and increases battery life. Game flashcards are currently able to hold up to 16GB of information. They are based off the MultiMediaCard standard, but have a different pinout and the expected copy protection in an effort to deter (casual) piracy. Sony's use of off-the-shelf memory technology proved to be the Vita's saving grace as an aftermarket adapter known as SD2Vita became an inexpensive alternative to overpriced memory cards, allowing the use of commodity Micro SD cards to expand the console's storage beyond what Sony intended.
 * The price was $249 for the wi-fi only model and $299 for the model with 3G support.

While not as powerful as a PS3 (the closest equivalent to it in terms of computing capabilities is the iPhone 4S or the third-generation iPad, at least with its shared PowerVR underpinnings), Sony intended the Vita to be easy for developers to import assets from their PS3 games to the Vita, and at least some games were cut-down or even unabridged ports of their home console counterparts such as the 2012 Need for Speed: Most Wanted reboot. Several games outright support transferring saves between the PS3 or PS4 counterpart (a feature technically first seen on the PSP and PS3 with Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and technically included in the older Pursuit Force 2 but the console version of that game never materialized), but the need to purchase the same game twice meant this was actually a great deal less than practical.

Another feature of the hardware is the inclusion of a touch-sensitive pad on the back of the system. The first application was shown at the debut of the system demonstrating Nathan Drake of Uncharted climbing a vine. Sliding your fingers down the touch pad would cause Nate to ascend the vine. The early models of the system also sported an OLED screen (which is normally seen in smartphones), but this was dropped in later models in favor of a standard screen as a cost cutting and battery life measure.

The PS Vita was stated to have a battery life of 3 - 5 hours depending on the system's settings, although in practice battery life was even shorter. An external battery, available at the western launch, could increase that time to 15 hours of nonstop play at full settings.

The console didn't have appreciable internal memory, it must be bought separately, in the format of a Sony Memory Stick, a new type of memory stick which is exclusive for the Vita; the PRO and DUO Memory Sticks used by the PSP won't work on it. This would prove to be the biggest cause for Vita's downfall, as the memory sticks were absurdly overpriced compared to commodity (Micro) SD Cards. This would prove to be a problem as games were fairly large, and the system's disc management was locked down in a (failed) attempt to prevent custom firmware with a bizarre oversight in the file management software that rendered it impossible to easily backup saves while deleting game data.

Continuing on Sony's tradition of backwards compatibility, the Vita is backwards-compatible with PSP and emulated PS1 games, albeit only through downloadable games purchased from the PSN since the Vita lacks a UMD drive. Sony later released a second revision in 2013 (model PCH-2000, colloquially known as the PS Vita Slim) which is 20% thinner and 15% lighter, dispensing the OLED panel with a cheaper LCD display and increasing the battery life. The PCH-2000 also comes with 1GB of onboard storage (though the card slot still remains; said onboard storage is actually part of the Vita's flash chip which remains the same across revisions, only repartitioned to make use of otherwise unused space), replaced the proprietary charging/data port with a micro USB port, and removed the otherwise-unused accessory port.

Sony also released a non-portable microconsole variant of the Vita called the PS Vita TV in Japan on November 14th, 2013. It was intended as a companion device that could play PS Vita and PlayStation Plus games on a TV with a DualShock controller, as well as stream PS4 games onto a different television through Wi-Fi. It too proved to be a critical and commercial failure for Sony as a good chunk of the Vita's library is blacklisted either due to the games' use of Vita-specific features or for no good reason, among them being Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Assassin's Creed III: Liberation, Lumines: Electronic Symphony, Tearaway, Gravity Rush, Borderlands 2, The Sly Collection and others. Hackers found ways to bypass the blacklist, though compatibility issues remain due to some games' dependency on features such as the rear touchpad; in theory developers could have released updates to account for the Vita TV's control differences, but this never materialised (though later ports of Assassin's Creed III: Liberation to other systems did rework the controls somewhat). Due to low hardware sales, Sony released the Vita TV as the "PlayStation TV" outside Asia, disassociating themselves from the already tainted Vita brand.

When it was released in Japan, on December 17th, 2011, it did well for a week but lost 3/4ths of its sales numbers the next, being outsold the week of Christmas not just by its main competition, the Nintendo 3DS, but by the original PSP as well. And numbers have only declined since then. Unfortunately, the Japanese market would prove to be the most successful by far, thanks to Japanese developers taking advantage of the lower budgets to make very original and innovative games for the system. The international release would wind up doing even worse, with the cost of the proprietary memory even more absurd (the largest of the memory options never making it to the west), while Sony of America was unwilling to support, and later outright hostile to (outright banning their release or forcing absurd censorship requirements) the oddball Japanese games that made of most of the system's exclusives.

Though despite having been a critical and commercial flop, the Vita did gain a loyal cult following especially in the late 2010s to early 2020s when security researchers managed to successfully defeat the console's security (though certain aspects of it are still being worked on), paving the way for a thriving homebrew scene. While some of these hacks are in the form of unofficial ports of popular Android games to the Vita, others focused on quality-of-life improvements such as adapters which allow commodity SD cards to be used as external storage instead of the absurdly expensive proprietary memory cards. An essential modification is the HENkaku jailbreak, which basically opens the door for modding the Vita and allows for homebrew (and unfortunately piracy). HENkaku in itself isn't persistent and requires the user to reapply it on every reboot, akin to a semi-untethered jailbreak on an iOS device; this can be remedied by installing Enso, which is a custom firmware based on version 3.60 and 3.65 and permanently jailbreaks the Vita, though not without the risk of bricking if you don't know what you're doing. Also essential is Adrenaline, a virtualised PlayStation Portable environment where games and apps written for the PSP can played. Specifications=

Processors

 * Quad-core 32-bit ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU. Clock speed is up to 444 MHz, but is underclocked to 333 MHz to conserve battery life. Can be overclocked to 500 MHz through homebrew apps.
 * 333 MHz MIPS32 R4000 R4k-based CPU (as found by security researcher Yifan Lu) for PSP backwards compatibility.
 * Quad-core PowerVR SGX543+ GPU clocked at 111 MHz; max clock speed at 222 MHz. Unlike the PS3's GeForce 7800GTX-based Reality Synthesizer whose compute power is at 228.8 GFLOPS, the Vita's PowerVR GPU is capable of 28.4 GFLOPS.
 * A Toshiba MeP-c5 embedded security coprocessor, nicknamed "F00D".

Memory

 * 512 MB of general purpose RAM
 * 128 MB of video RAM
 * 3.78 GB of internal NAND storage. Both PCH-1000 and 2000 series models reserve all 3.78 GB for kernel and system files, but in practice only part of it is used. The PCH-2000 and PlayStation TV models allocate 1GB for user data, though this can also be unlocked on a 1000-series model through homebrew.
 * The Vita uses proprietary memory cards unlike its predecessor which takes commodity Memory Sticks. Comes in sizes of 4 GB up to 64 GB.
 * Vita games come in flash memory-based game cartridges which use a custom variant of the MultiMediaCard standard likely to reduce costs.

Graphics

 * 5 inches (12.7 cm) OLED screen with a resolution of 960x544 pixels (twice that of the PSP). The PCH-2000 model uses an LCD instead.
 * PowerVR SGX543 MP4+ GPU, similar to the one used on the Apple A5X used on the iPad third generation, but with custom features added by Sony

Other

 * Two touch inputs: one capacitive touchscreen, and a rear touchpad similar to those on laptops
 * Two VGA cameras: one on the front and another on the back
 * SIXAXIS accelerometer
 * Accessory port; only present on the PCH-1000 model and left unused
 * USB port for charging and data exchange. The PCH-1000 uses a proprietary port while the PCH-2000 came with a standard micro-USB port
 * 802.11n wireless
 * Bluetooth 2.1
 * 3G cellular connectivity (PCH-110X models only). The service was available for NTT DoCoMo in Japan, AT&T in the US, Rogers in Canada and Vodafone in Europe and Australia