Sony executives will be celebrating in the boardroom today as they have issued a statement to say that they have sold out of the Playstation Vita portable device, via preorders in Japan.
Andrew House, chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment told reporters yesterday “There were lines to make reservations for the machine at retailers.” When he was asked how many they had sold, he declined to give specifics.
Sony will be selling the Vita in Japan on December 17th, as it replaces the PSP handheld which was originally launched in 2004. Sony started taking preorders for the VITA on October the 15th and the hardware specifications are impressive. It has a 5 inch OLED (organic based) display which has support for 16 million colours at a 960×544 resolution. The screen is a touchscreen, with twin cameras and stereo speakers.
Sony have built the console around a powerful quad core processor based on the ARM Cortex A9, the same processor you will find in many larger tablets. Battery life hasn't been confirmed, but we would assume around 5 hours. The memory configuration is said to be 512MB of ram, with 128MB of VRAM.
Sony are still selling the successful Playstation 3 console, and slashed the prices in revive the sales which were flagging.
Pricing of the VITA console is said to be around £279.99 (3G) and £229.99 (Wifi), which is close to a direct dollar to pound conversion. A sad fact of life for UK residents who spend their money on hardware.
Kitguru says: We wonder how many units they have actually sold under preorder.
Might pick one up, but its a bit costly, same price as the PS3 basically.