You know everything you hated about the PSP? Well, Sony knows too, and that’s where they got started with development on the next-gen portable PlayStation Vita.<\/p>\n
“What we didn’t do right with the PSP was where we started when we began the development of PlayStation Vita,” Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, tells Gamesindustry.biz<\/a>.<\/p>\n “We were very happy with having something very close to the PS2 experience in a portable format with the PSP, but we didn’t do a good enough job creating the proper interface to really play games with graphics in 3D. The lack of a right analog stick, for example. That’s something we wanted to attack with the PS Vita because we wanted to enhance the portable core gaming experience and we have to do it right,” said Yoshida.<\/p>\n “The other thing was that after a couple of years with the PSP people get used to looking at pretty pictures and especially after the launch of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 the expectations for graphics moves on,” Yoshida adds. “Just having great graphics on a pretty screen wouldn’t have been enough. That’s why we spent so much time innovating with user interface devices like the touch pad or camera and motion sensors.”<\/p>\n I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find anything about them improving on the PSP’s virtually non-existent battery life either.<\/p>\n Sony announced the US pricing<\/a> for the device at E3 2011 – it will cost Americans between $249 (R1689) and $299 (R2028) at launch. The $249 PS Vita will be WiFi only, while the more expensive variant will offer 3G support.<\/p>\n Pricing elsewhere in the world has yet to be revealed, but we could expect something to emerge at Germany’s Gamescom Expo coming up in August 2011.<\/p>\n We also have a hint at the pricing of PS Vita games, although only for the US market at this point. MyGaming did some hardcore science combined with outrageous thumb-sucking to take a stab at what the games might cost<\/a> when they hit our shores.<\/p>\n