

How Fast Are Vita Memory Cards? - kurtable
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-how-fast-are-vita-memory-cards

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potatolicious
Sony screws their customers yet again.

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.

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klausa
I undertand why people are upset that Sony charges more money for those cards
than off-the-shelf SD cards, but there are few (arguably bad) reasons for
that.

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.

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civild
Your second (third?) point is moot, since Sony's own Content Manager
Assistant[1] can copy anything from your Vita memory card onto a Mac or PC.
The piracy chat from Sony's spokespersons is pure marketing dross.

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.

[1] <http://cma.dl.playstation.net/cma/>

~~~
klausa
Ah, that's weird. I was under impression that CMA would allow you only to copy
over specific data - akin to iTunes, but seems I was wrong. (Or was I? From
the link:

    
    
      You can display lists of music, image, and video files stored on your computer and transfer the files to your PS Vita system.
    

That sounds like iTunes-esque thing - is anyone here in possession of Vita and
could chime in about this?)

Nevertheless, thanks for that link.

~~~
civild
It allows you to copy pretty much anything, including "Apps" of which Games
are a subtype. PSP hacker websites like Wololo are already poring over
encrypted .psvimg files.

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.

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KeyBoardG
Charging extra for a mandatory peice is unacceptable to me. Buying the system,
with a 32gb memory card and a AAA game is going over $400 american. For a
handheld with a sub par browser that just doesn't make sense.

~~~
teamonkey
The fact hat you even mentioned the browser suggests that you may not be the
target market.

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wcchandler
security != piracy prevention...

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.

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shawndumas
was this to avoid paying Microsoft for FAT?

~~~
ghshephard
Not sure why you got downvoted - I wonder if this is a patent license issue,
if not FAT, then perhaps something else?

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danso
After having bought one of Spny's early digital cameras (circa 2000) and a
voice recorder, both which used proprietary memory formats, I vowed never to
buy another Sony product again (though I did get a replacement PS2). I've
since gone back on my vow now that Sony is producing competitive cameras that
use standard memory cards, but I'm glad I'm not a gamer anymore

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hackermom
Sony does it again. Time and again this company keeps shooting itself in the
foot, refusing to take notice.

