PS Vita...Dead On Arrival

Sometimes I don't know why Sony tries so hard, they should cut their loses and give up. They will never have a solid footing in the handheld market.

I know Sony has a vision of dominating the gaming market but handhelds just aren't their thing. When the PSP was first released all those years ago it seemed like a great idea on paper, but lack of developer support made sure that it would never be able to steal some market share away from the Nintendo DS. Don't get me started on the PSP GO, that didn't make much sense at all. They should have just held off until the PS Vita and that was made clear with the lackluster sales of the GO.

Now with the Vita launching in North America this month there is more competition than ever. Almost everyone and their grandmother has a DS these days; to the average consumer Nintendo is synonymous with handheld gaming. To make things worse for Sony, Apple is the new big boy on the block and anything with the prefix "i" sells like hotcakes. There are so many apps for ipods and iphones that you could really spend a life time gaming on those devices.

The main reason why the Vita will fail is simply due to price, the price of games and memory. Why buy a $40 game when you can buy a $5 app on your itouch? The majority of people would say the $5 app is the obvious choice. Unless the Vita has one hell of a launch line up, there will be little incentive to purchase the hardware. My main beef with Sony is the ridiculous price they are charging for memory sticks to store games and all other media on the Vita. The Vita relies entirely on memory sticks for storage and Sony's proprietary storage medium costs a multiple of any other memory stick. It's sad that they are going to nickle and dime consumers with their memory sticks.

Aside from the fact that Sony has failed to release a viable handheld platform twice, the cost of memory storage will deter most consumers. It puzzles me that such a large company like Sony doesn't have enough sense to call it a day and focus solely on their PS3 and "PS4"; but I feel a sense of futility trying to understand such things .