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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

Bold move by Sony but the PS Vita is fundamentally borked by ignoring / excluding the Android ecosystem. Having owned 3 PSPs and dozens of UMDs I would rush to buy a Vita and the TV version, the hardware quality was always fantastic and the PS Vita looks a lot better than any sub-7" android/ios device for gaming, but being deliberately incompatible with everything I've bought in the last couple of years is just silly.

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Sony is going to have a truckload of indie titles on PS VITA which VITA TV owners will directly benefit from. In total there are around 1300 games ready to be picked up and played (PS1, PSP and PS VITA combined).

I'd pick a pure gaming platform game over an Android / iOS based game any day. 100% Controller support for all games, and the games are generally of higher quality.

Sony having 100% control of the underlying platform for the device for 100% integration with their other devices (PS4, PS3, etc) is far more important than supporting Android games.

I think this is pretty much the end for Ouya, come to think of it. Android is just too fragile as a pure gaming device compared to something that was built from the ground up for that sole purpose.

Other than just gaming, the ability to watch movies, listen to music, stream PS4 to another TV, instead of purchasing 2 PS4's, (e.g. one for the bedroom and one for the living room), are excellent features. Each of which on their own are excellent selling points, except you get all of them for the same price.

I think a lot of people may be underestimating this product. If successful, they are literally taking Apple's Apple TV and Ouya's market at the same time, as well as creating a new market themselves.

They deliberately ignored it because Android at the time would have been a horrible choice. The PS Vita was released in late 2011. About a month after ICS was unveiled. This means it would have ran either 2.3 or 3.2, either of which would have been terrible choices.

Not to mention the overhead of Android and maintenance burden of using an OS that has to support so many other devices and functions. This might be your reason for not liking the Vita but I doubt it applies to many others. There are countless Android console style devices and judging by their lack of mainstream success, I seriously doubt this would have caused the Vita to fare much better than it has.

Sony's been making android devices for a long time including this little gem back in the 2.x days:

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/sony...

I am typing this comment one of these, and I find quite sad that when it dies, no-one made a continuation or substitute of it :(

I think Sony should've just used Android as the base for PS Vita (and later PS4, etc), instead of going around it and making that "PS Mobile" thing that had to be compatible with both Android and the Vita OS, which in the end they ended up ignoring anyway.

I get this feeling that in US especially, people will be more reluctant to join the "Sony ecosystem" precisely because it's not much of an "ecosystem".

Having deep integration with Android and Google's ecosystem to fight against Microsoft, would've been the superior strategy in my opinion. Who will want to use "Sony apps" or "Sony services", or "Sony video-chat"? I can tell you a lot fewer people than if they were "Google apps, Google services, Google video-chat", etc.

It's good to see Sony innovating and being disruptive with this $100 console, but I think whatever they're doing now could've been amplified many times over by being part of a much larger ecosystem. Unless you think the 3 main ecosystems right now are already too big, and they should be more decentralized, and less powerful? That could be a good argument for consumers, but either way Sony will be fighting an uphill battle.

The biggest thing is that Sony's high-end phone line, Xperia, is in the Android space. So Sony is juggling two ecosystems when they could have one.

Imagine a single unified Sony ecosystem - make a small and large phone/PSP (small like Xperia Play, large like PSP) device and sell both in phone and wifi-only versions. Then bring in the set-top device.

You could make the native remote for your set-top a Move, then you get good interaction with touch-oriented apps.

Personally, if I were Sony I'd just be forking Android and making a de-Google'd form. Then use Sony's massive media and gaming assets to have the mother of all e-shops.

Interestingly enough, they have the PlayStation Mobile platform which allows for Android + PS Vita cross-compatible games (based on Mono) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Mobile

It's beyond retarded they make a subset of their stuff that (even in its entirety) relatively nobody will buy compatible with the devices everyone has been buying instead for the last few years. Mono isn't even a serious choice for games outside of Unity3d because Xamarin charge so much it's not worth it unless you have a mountain of existing stuff to port.

Sony had some other certification program previously as well and even made a nice little psp phone on top of Android but they just let the whole concept rot last time.

Edit: you can browse all ~60 games released under this new initiative here - http://us.playstation.com/ps-products/BrowseGames?&sortOrder...

> Sony had some other certification program previously as well and even made a nice little psp phone on top of Android but they just let the whole concept rot last time.

It's still the same initiative/system, the Sony Ericsson Play was the first Playstation Certified Android phone.

Mono's price is a rounding error in most software projects.

It is only an issue for hobby developers.

Are you saying Sony is making a mistake by NOT polluting their platform with all the Android crapware?

They did the same thing with the Sony Dash http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/01/sony-dash-review/ . Had it been an Android clock rather than a Chumby clock it would have been extremely useful.

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