I still use it to this day because I can't fit my Steam Deck in my pocket.
And I concur that its potential did kinda go to waste. Imagine if we had Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls available on it.
And yes, I still consider the Vita the last true "portable". potability in my mind implies pocketability, and the Switch and every other non-phone went beyond that. Devices like the Ayaneo Air do give me hope that that "pocketable" market may make a comback sooner than we think, though.
There are "controller grips" or "controller mounts" for phones readily available and you can even pair it with Steam in-house streaming or Moonlight to play games at a quality that is impossible at this form factor for cheap.
Even at larger sizes it's difficult - The Nintendo Switch only worked because of great franchises and IP. The Steam Deck also required great technological investment into Linux and platform familiarity.
It's not hard to see why barely anyone's trying...
I do in fact have a smartphone with a controller mount. Mostly for emulators at this point. But most of the time it can feel like no one is really taking advantadge of the hardware capabilities of modern phone hardware.
Yes in a technical sense. But no in a business and ecosystem sense.
PSP and Vita had very impressive game offerings that we don’t get on mobile to this day. The games felt like proper PlayStation games, only about 0.5 console generations behind. Back then it meant PS2.5 games. Today it would mean PS4.5 games on your handheld.
Switch is probably the closest today due to its first party games and very fluent support for many popular titles, unlike Steam Deck which is still a bit hacky and not everything it offers runs well. But Switch technically is several generations behind. PSP and Vita really felt like 2/3rds of your PlayStation 3.
No smartphone with a controller add on offers an experience of PlayStation 4.5 with first party titles and support. The business side was executed very well on PSP/Vita. The developers cared for that console.
The nub was announced at the same time as an announcement where the memory was quadrupled so I think it was probably intended to be only PS1 level games on it originally.
I’m hoping strong sales of the PSPortal encourages development into a standalone mobile device, but I’m not hopeful it’ll replace my PSP3000/Vita2000 for daily driving.
Have the OLEDs all started dying or something?
* Burn in. Everyone knows about this, not a huge issue on most Vitas.
* Use degradation. Using the OLED panel will slowly cause it to become more dim, and each color dims at a different rate. Blue dims 10% by 1k hours, and by 10k hours you can expect half total brightness. The Vita was released 10 years ago, and many of them have seen thousands of hours of gameplay by now.
* UV exposure. UV radiation is damaging to OLED displays, even when powered off. Long periods of small exposure, even if kept enclosed in storage, can damage the display. For Vita displays this is the major problem. Vitas that were rarely used outside/near windows, and were stored in dark places will have the least amount of UV damage. All of them should be noticeably more dim than their time of manufacture if it were possible to compare side by side.
The OLED vita side by side with the non OLED is still my preferred display. You are right though, if you want to rack up thousands of hours and add another decade onto the decade already past, the LCD unit is the better bet.
Looking back the old screen was awesome. Going forward I think the LCD Vitas will be a better pick.
Really? That's an interesting opinion - I own both and vastly prefer the original Vita due to that OLED screen, it's just better in every way(the screen).
For that kind of cash, you might as well get the real Vita from a second-hand market. Better yet, for that kind of cash, get Steam Deck, unless you have some restrictions like OP (i.e. "SD is too big")