The PS Vita coming to the rest of the world on February 22 - Should we care?

It was just announced today that Sony's new handheld system, the PS Vita is being released outside of Japan on February 22nd.

There can be no doubt that this is one serious piece of handheld gaming hardware

This is a couple of months after the launch in Japan and almost exactly a year after the release of the Nintendo 3DS, which is the other big player in this space.

The 3DS has really struggled out of the gate for Nintendo. It has not at all managed to live up to the massive expectations that were naturally created for the successor to the DS.
How seriously Nintendo is taking this was evident, when the 3DS recently received a very significant price drop to entice buyers away from their Pokemon toting systems of yesteryear.

Obviously Sony should be rubbing their hands at the apparent lack of success for the 3DS.
Surely this means that the PS Vita has a very good chance at usurping the Nintendo handhelds as the mobile gaming platform of choice, and start raking in money hand over fist.

However, there are deep rumblings in the handheld gaming market.
Since the birth of Snake on old Nokia phones, there has been a competing handheld product to these "pure bred" systems like the DS and Vita.

Sure, for many years you could not really argue that the extremely simple and limited games that were available on phones were any kind of threat to the dedicated gaming systems.
But with the rise of smartphones, there is a good chance that the person who is in the market for a DS already owns a phone that is pretty much just as strong in terms of technical capability.

The N-Gage. A very early and unsuccessful attempt to merge gaming and phones.
But in hindsight, a sign of things to come

And it's not just a question of specs.
Game developers have begun taking the phone game market more and more seriously, and we are seeing games that are as deep as many of the games that are available on Nintendo or Sony systems.
Games like Game Dev Story, a game that sucked up many hours of my life, show that there's a lot more to play on the phone platforms than just Angry Birds.

So Sony has gone all out with the Vita and specced it out in a way that no current phone can hope to match.
Both in terms of raw power and screen real estate this is a device that screams high end mobile gaming.

But I think that the Vita will find itself incredibly squeezed by the phones killer feature; You will always carry that device with you wherever you go.
Few people that own a smartphone are "casual" users of their phone, and they will pretty much always have it on them when they are out and about.

This means that it is extremely practical to have all your games on this device, since you will then not need to worry about remembering and recharging another device, or trying to fit it into your pockets without looking like a deviant or a shoplifter.

It may not have the dedicated hardware of a PS Vita,
but a modern smartphone can still give you plenty of excellent gaming enjoyment

I know for sure that I simply do not have the pocket space on me to carry a Vita *and* a phone with me at the same time.
And the phone is going to win that contest any day of the week.

I think there is a very big chance that the Vita is going to be the last dedicated gaming device that we see being pushed out by a large company.

It's going to be extremely interesting to follow the sales of the PS Vita once it launches all over the world and see how it all pans out.



 Subscribe in a reader