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Vita's Design Has Surprising Ties To Old-School Sony
James Gallagher, of the PlayStation Blog, attended the official launch of the PS Vita in Japan earlier in the week. He's compiled a few tidbits from his trip in a new post, which includes a surprising link between Sony's latest handheld system and the company's old-school consumer-electronic roots.
In addition to passing along a few mundane details such as what's inside the system's box, Gallagher mentions a chat he had with Takashi Sogabe, from Sony's Corporate Design Centre. Sogabe's team designed the physical form that players will hold in their hand. Sogabe knows a thing or two about hardware design, Gallagher says, since he designed the original Sony Walkman cassette player.
Sogabe told Gallagher that the system had undergone several iterations, including a sliding form factor similar to that of the ill-fated PSP Go, before hitting upon the final version pictured above. Gallagher also got a chance to peek at a few of the PS Vita's prototypes, though he says he wasn't allowed to snap any pictures. One of them even included touchpads where the analog sticks are now (yikes!). Sogabe said that he had originally wanted the system to have a metallic exterior, but that composition of case interfered with Wi-Fi and 3G connections.
We don't have any shots of doomed prototypes, either, but our own Matt Helgeson just posted his video unboxing and impressions of the system. Check it out here.
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