Well folks, the wait is over. Sony has announced that the PlayStation Vita will be hitting shelves February 22nd at retailers in the US, Canada, Latin America and Europe. In addition to all your favorite gaming titles and a pocket filled with 512MB of RAM, you'll be able to chat it up with your fellow assassins cross-game or via Facebook, Foursquare, Skype and Twitter. If that's not enough, the 5-inch OLED display, dual analog sticks, dual cameras, and front and rear touch panel should be enough get you amped for a Call of Duty campaign on the handheld device. Keep in mind: this bad boy will sport 3G from AT&T for $299 or you can snag the WiFi-only model for $249.

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Sony announced in Tokyo that the PlayStation Vita will debut in Japan on December 17th, and it'll partner with NTT DoCoMo for the console's prepaid 3G service. Customers will have two choices of connection here: 980 yen for 20 hours, and 4,980 yen for 100 hours. Alas, the rest of the world will still have to wait until 2012.

Capcom's Yoshinori Ono came on stage to mention that Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 would launch simultaneously with the console.

Square Enix also announced that the PS2's Final Fantasy X will be remastered for the PS Vita, and it'll be in PS3-like quality.



http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/14/sony-playstation-vita-debuts-in-japan-on-december-17th-partneri/

Vita's 512MB of RAM enables it to run programs in the background while gamers are playing games, Sony has said.
One of those programs is cross-game voice chat via Vita's Party system.
"Part of the reason [for including 512MB of RAM] is more RAM means easier development for game developers," Sony president of Worldwide Studios Shu Yoshida told Eurogamer at Gamescom.
"But as important as that is to allow the PS Vita always to do more while the game is running in the background, or when you switch between the game and other applications or system software functionalities.
"So the reason why we were able to include something like Party, which enables cross-game voice chat, is because we designed Vita so it always has enough resources to handle something like that behind the game while it's running."
At Gamescom Sony revealed the final specifications of Vita, set for launch in Europe in early 2012.
The confirmation of 512MB of RAM ended months of speculation about the power of the machine, speculation sparked by a comment by a developer that appeared to back up murmurings that Sony had halved the amount of memory in Vita.
The RAM reduction rumour began in May when a French source said Sony had lowered the base Wi-Fi Vita model's RAM from 512MB to 256MB to lower the cost of the unit to compete with Nintendo's 3DS.
But according to Yoshida, Sony never even considered cutting the amount of memory powering the portable.
"It has been very funny," he said. "There were some rumours for the last few months. Some developer mentioned the RAM was halved. We never announced the amount of RAM, and we never changed it.
"We've been making games, right, and we've been showing the games, like Uncharted, since January. If RAM gets cut in the middle of development, there's no way we can complete the games. So I was like, what's going on?
"I got lots of Tweets saying, Sony made a huge mistake by reducing the amount of RAM. We never talked about the amount of RAM and we never cut it.
"So going into Gamescom we agreed there was no reason we should hide it, so we just added it to the specifications. We always had 512MB of main RAM and 128MB of V-RAM. Actually when you add them together, PS Vita has more RAM than PS3 [the PS3 has 256MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256MB of GDDR3 video memory]."
The speculation around Vita's RAM caused some concern over the power of the final version of the machine. Yoshida moved to reassure gamers about this.
"So far we've been getting very positive reactions from our developer and publisher partners," he said. "We could put even more power into the portable, but there has to be a balance made between the size of the unit, the weight and the amount of time you can play. We think we've hit the right balance in terms of creating a great experience on the PS Vita.
"The PS3 provides a full HD experience. The resolution on the PS Vita screen is much lower. Even though it's four times the resolution of PSP, compared to the console, the amount of data you have to push is much smaller. So that works to the advantage of the PS Vita."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-18-sony-why-ps-vita-has-512mb-of-ram

You could use PlayStation Vita as a controller for PS3 games, Sony has revealed.

This Wii U-like capability was explained by Sony Europe R&D manager Phil Rogers at the Develop Conference 2011.

"What could you do with all of this?" Rogers asked a room of developers and Eurogamer. "Here's a few boring technical ideas: you could drive a display from a PS3 game, for example.

"PS3 can send data down to Vita and Vita can display it. You could use the unique features [of Vita] - gyroscope, touch front and back - as a control device for a PS3 game.

"You can run software on both devices and use the network to sync the game states. And that's pretty good, because you then have the processing power of PS3 doing that work, Vita [doing] fancy graphics - however you want to do it. You're not sacrificing the PS3's CPU to be able to have a rich experience on Vita."

Rogers said this was "a fairly new idea", and encouraged developers to talk to Sony if they have any ideas for it. "Most of the time we'll be OK with it," he said.

Another thing Vita can do is cross-platform play. This was demonstrated with WipEout 2048 on Vita talking to a bespoke compatible build of WipEout HD on PS3. The two games connected via PSN and, after a lengthy wait for the Vita version to load, worked together seamlessly. The PS3 version had a visibly higher frame-rate and was the better looking of the two games, although the difference at a glance was minimal.

Rogers mentioned that pool game Hustle Kings will also support cross-platform play. He also confirmed Vita Remote Play support for platform launch, whenever that will be.

"At launch we're going to have some PSN features that work across both platforms."
Phil Rogers, manager, Sony Europe R&D
"At launch we're going to have some PSN features that work across both platforms," said Rogers. "You could access data on each side and access scoreboards, for example. We're building on that.

"Obviously we had to bring certain things on and make sure that servers work against all the features and it doesn't break the PS3 experience, because there's a lot of PS3 users.

"For launch we'll also have Remote Play, which does look good on Vita - I saw an early version of it running recently."

Remote Play allows the Vita to receive encoded video output in real-time from PS3.

One of the more ambitious and alluring PS Vita capabilities is called Continuation Play. This allows a PS3 game to be played and then taken on the move on PS Vita.

"We have a system called Title User Storage, which allows 1MB of data on our servers for games," explained Rogers. "And that can be accessed on both platforms; you can access that same data.

"You can save your game on PS3, go over to Vita, pull that data back and swap it between them, so you can play a game at home, take it on the train and continue."

"You can save your game on PS3, go over to Vita, pull that data back and ... take it on the train and continue."
Phil Rogers
Rogers said Ruin, a Diablo-like action RPG, was the only announced PS Vita game that currently uses Continuation Play. "But there's probably a few that we've seen via the support site that we can't talk about," he teased.

"The feature is there," he added. "We've told developers that you can use Title User Storage to push the game data across."

The connection between PS Vita and PS3 will be handled via Wi-Fi and through the PlayStation Network.

"The important thing to note, and people always forget this, is that the Network exists; you don't need fancy cables, you don't need to have that there," said Rogers. "You're connected over an access point; send IP to each other - it just works.

"We did support USB, but [there's] not really much more point for that - wireless is fairly decent."

Further down the line, Rogers said developers will be able to retroactively patch-in support for Vita in existing PS3 games.

He also said Sony was making a concerted effort to encourage developers to use these new ideas arriving with PlayStation Vita.

"There's a push from our third-party team for encouraging licensees to be having those features [cross-platform, continuation play] in game," he said.

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