How Fast Are Vita Memory Cards?
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
For the $60 they're asking for the 16GB Vita card, you can get pretty much the fastest memory card on the market: a UHS-1 SDHC card that blazes at 45MB/s read/write. That's nearly 8x faster than the Vita cards.
The arrogance of this company astounds me still. They continually go out of their way to give their customers a poorer customer experience for more cost, and yet they don't get why they're losing so badly on the market - they're shedding TV market share, console gaming market share, and they've long since lost mobile gaming market share.
First of all, these are MUCH smaller than SD cards - microSD are better for comparisons (granted, those are much cheaper too) - but there are two reasons why those cards are priced like that.
Secondly - it's no mystery that console makers lose money on hardware they sell, and recoup part of the cost on accessories and licenses on games - and it's easier to upsell $30 4GB memory card, than charge $280 or $330 for portable console.
Thirdly - making them proprietary prevents you from putting those cards in any random microSD card reader and putting whatever you want on them - and Sony spokespersons publicly admitted that they are proprietary to make eventual piracy harder.
As for their right to earn money, I don't think anyone is debating that - Digital Foundary's main criticism is the speed of the media, which is (through empirical testing of course) significantly worse than standard microSD cards that are much cheaper.
The best comparison though is to Nintendo's 3DS which comes bundled with a standard SD card, and it hasn't fallen to piracy yet.
You can display lists of music, image, and video files stored on your computer and transfer the files to your PS Vita system.
Nevertheless, thanks for that link.
I know this because I own one, and I ran out of space on my 4GB Vita memory card within a day just by downloading games from PSN. The CMA is a life saver because I can use my PC as backup storage, essentially, without being forced to buy a larger, more expensive, memory card.
Of course, this just leaves the matter of convenience, which is why the performance of the media is such an annoying factor.
As for the CMA itself, it simply acts as a daemon once it is set up - there's no GUI and all file transfers are handled on the Vita itself.
It could mean a wide array of things ranging from integrity checks, write prevention, DRM, etc. This article (and these comments) only seemed to focus on the former.