Would a PS Vita HD refresh work?

G

gongo

Regular
....not a Vita2 but a doubled down Vita....a 6.4" 1080p screen, unibody aluminium. quad core cpu and gpu from the A15/544MP8 chips, 1GB ram, 256mb vram...plays Vita games in HD? To sell side by side with the more kids friendly original Vita?

TBH i think Vita 5" 540p screen is tad small for asymmetric PS4 gaming ...and a tad low PPI resy besides the 720/1080 smartphones.....

I think Sony can try to aim for the ...upper market with VitaHD...
 
gongo said:
....not a Vita2 but a doubled down Vita....a 6.4" 1080p screen, unibody aluminium. quad core cpu and gpu from the A15/544MP8 chips, 1GB ram, 256mb vram...plays Vita games in HD? To sell side by side with the more kids friendly original Vita?

TBH i think Vita 5" 540p screen is tad small for asymmetric PS4 gaming ...and a tad low PPI resy besides the 720/1080 smartphones.....

I think Sony can try to aim for the ...upper market with VitaHD...
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Have you used a Vita? Most games are not native res.
 
gongo said:
I think Sony can try to aim for the ...upper market with VitaHD...
Click to expand...
There is no upper market for portable gaming devices. The cheapest gadget sells the most, generally, as most people who use them are kids and kids generally have no money themselves; it's their parents who have to buy them stuff. So cheap > everything else pretty much, with battery life playing some part as well. Games selection plays a part too of course, but the games tend to gravitate towards the device that has the biggest market appeal/share, so that's a problem that self-manages its own solution.

Features and gimmicks are a very distant runner-up to price and games. The original gameboy sold like crazy and it had mono sound, a (terrible!) monochrome LCD and really BAD hardware all-around. The only things going for it was price, and longest battery life by far compared to its competitors. The atari lynx absolutely roflstomped the gameboy from a hardware/performance standpoint, it didn't matter one iota. The lynx went the way of the dodo with its batteries drained flat in 15 minutes, while the gameboy soldiered on for years like a japanese version of the energizer bunny. :)

Unibody aluminium vita? Only if sony wants to drive itself into bankruptcy even faster. Last thing they need right now is a niche, way more expensive version of a device that never sold well to begin with.
 
Vita is starting to become a pretty neat device and surprisingly versatile, but also a niche product, for anyone who wants to take his/her portable gaming seriously. I think that in theory, Sony could make one with a bigger screen (useful for some users only, but perhaps it would make sense for instance for somethingl ike remote play and gaming at home).

If you upt he resolution, then it must be by 4x. no more no less, to preserve pixel fidelity. Personally I would leave the resolution alone unless they also beef up the general purpose features of the device a good deal more as well. But that would mean that Playstation Mobile is souped up considerably so it gets all the important Android/iOS releases and that the general purpose features of the device become more tablet like. I don't know if that would make a lot of sense, but they could do it if they can somehow combine its benefits across Android, PS3 and Vita to a much greater extent than before.

For now though I'm happy with Vita as it is, and they should focus on making PS3 / Vita interaction an easier experience. It still seems a bit too fiddly to setup the Vita as a controller for your PS3, for instance for games like LBP 2 and Guacamelee. And I think getting the device price lower will help greatly if Remote Play ends up working as well as it looks like it may between Vita and PS4, then that alone can be a big boost for the device. But there, I do think a bigger screen might help - some text of console games gets a bit too small on the current screen.
 
As much as I'd like to see another iteration, I think the vita could be Sony's last handheld. I think their recent focus on the indie developers has been good for the console, but I imagine smartphones will just serve more and more of many people's mobile gaming needs.

Personally, I would love to see a refresh in a couple years with a Cortex A57 heart and some evolved 8 cluster Rogue GPU monster, but I don't think it's going to happen.
 
anexanhume said:
As much as I'd like to see another iteration, I think the vita could be Sony's last handheld. I think their recent focus on the indie developers has been good for the console, but I imagine smartphones will just serve more and more of many people's mobile gaming needs.

Personally, I would love to see a refresh in a couple years with a Cortex A57 heart and some evolved 8 cluster Rogue GPU monster, but I don't think it's going to happen.
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Touchscreen as a gaming controller sucks (for the most part), until they come up with something that gives you the kind of responsiveness and control that mechanical buttons do, handhelds will be safe.
 
The price of the device itself isn't an issue, and the hardware and the screen are amazing. IMO what they need to do is either make a version that uses SDXC cards, or make a version that has 32GB integrated. Most complaints are from the additional $100 required to have anything close to a useful capacity.

The BOM estimates shows that Sony is making money on the hardware, so maybe keeping it a niche is more profitable than trying to undercut Nintendo... I mean selling a few million devices with a profit is better than selling tens of millions at a loss.
 
tuna said:
I think mobile gaming and portable gaming are two different things.
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jayco said:
Touchscreen as a gaming controller sucks (for the most part), until they come up with something that gives you the kind of responsiveness and control that mechanical buttons do, handhelds will be safe.
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Mobile gaming is "good enough" for a lot of the people that want to play games on the go, invalidating the need for handhelds. I think even 3DS numbers speak to this compared to the height of the DS.
 
dagamer said:
Battery life would be atrocious. Not happening.
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This! And Grall nailed the history...and history has a high probability of repeating.

Also wanted to comment on the already mentioned mobile phone vs portable console.

Smartphones are disposable devices and not really practical for portable console/arcade experiences.

Smartphones are not only trying to improve high performance but also battery life with the latter getting word of mouth over brand name but in two years or less they are disposable, a portable console is a collectible device because of what it did best.

A PS Vita XL might be what you are really asking for but even so it would be price/battery sensitive.
 
anexanhume said:
Mobile gaming is "good enough" for a lot of the people that want to play games on the go, invalidating the need for handhelds. I think even 3DS numbers speak to this compared to the height of the DS.
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But you don't have to sell iPhone-like numbers to be successful and profitable. There'll always be enough people for whom "good enough" will never be good enough.
 
Apple make profit on each iPhone hardware (if i remember correctly, the BOM is only under 300 dollar).

Sony make profit with Vita by selling memorycards, loss on each hardware
Nintendo claimed that 3DS make them got loss (when 1st time price cut happend) and then they claimed Wii U are sold at loss too.

Maybe reducing cost for portable gaming console is harder than cellphone? (due to custom screen, electronincs design, i dont know)
 
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I think releasing an official MOGA-style controller for mid/high-end smartphones will be the future of handheld consoles.

Samsung has already launched its own version. Sony is already implementing official support for the DualShock 3 on almost all Xperias. Plus kickstarter is flooding with successfully funded projects for adaptable gamepads for smartphones.

Only three essential things are missing in a high-end smartphone + gamepad combo, to make handheld consoles completely irrelevant:

1 - Unified driver like XInput in windows. Have all Androids supporting a device with an unified driver that game developers can use without worrying about which gamepad models to support, or moving the hassle of per-button/axis mapping to customers (this last one could be a huge turn-off).
This "standard" should also have the stacks for mandatory BT4.0 spec for low-power and NFC for fast pairing.

2 - Battery extension: Have the gamepads carry additional batteries with i.e. a retractable Micro-USB port to charge the smartphone while playing, in order to increase gaming battery life. Eventually, wireless charging may play a huge role in this. Just fit the smartphone into the gamepad and let NFC + wireless charging take care of the rest.

3 - Decent embedded stereo speakers in the gamepads. Apart from the HTC One, almost all smartphones really suck with a feeble backward-facing mono speaker.


They will also need developer support for higher quality games. I didn't number this because I believe it will come eventually one way or another. The major publishers can't be very happy with Gameloft making so much money by easily ripping off their franchises.
Plus, we're very close to having smartphones capable of running near-fully-fledged ports of the PS360. They can just port some of their best games and sell them for $5 for an easy way to increase profits over existing assets with minimal investment.




I think that if Sony ever releases a Vita refresh, it won't be for better graphics and more powerful hardware. They simply cannot keep up with the pace of the yearly-refreshed high-end SoCs from Qualcomm, Samsung, apple and now even Rockchips, Mediatek, Allwinner and others.

Rather, they'd shrink the SoC for higher battery life and maybe put additional analog triggers for better compatibility with PS4's remote play. Also, dual WiFi antennas for MIMO could be implemented for higher distances from the console.
Android would be the icing on the cake, though.
 
^ I'm honestly surprised the vita wasn't android based. Perhaps scared of games being cracked for other devices on the platform?
 
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