With Nintendo’s 3DS taking a nosedive, the time was ripe for Sony to finally step in and conquer the handheld gaming world. Then they announced prices for the various goodies to go with it, and, well, it was a nice idea while it lasted.
First of all, the battery lasts just three hours. THREE. HOURS. Secondly, Sony is pulling its usual stunt where if you want any memory for your system, you have to buy a proprietary memory card. This is kind of Sony’s thing, just like Apple screams in fury at the idea of using anything so pedestrian as, oh, a friggin’ microUSB port. They love rolling out proprietary media and memory standards hoping they’ll catch on and it’ll be the CD all over again, which it never is. Remember UMD? Or DAT? Or Minidisc? All Sony, all failures.
And, of course, to make you pay through the nose, they want $125 for 32GB of memory. Keep in mind, the whole idea of this system is to download games. I’ll just use the onboard memory, you say? There is none!
What makes this outstandingly stupid is the fact that smartphones are currently hijacking the mobile gaming market in a big way, and this is supposed to counteract that. We guess they’re hoping customers will be overwhelmed by the awesomeness of the system and willing to pay $500 to make it useable. Yeah, good luck with that, Sony.