We’ve seen and played a lot of PlayStation Vita over the past few months, but we’ve always been using debug units rather than retail versions, which don’t have the same connections or ports.
Until this week then, and the arrival of a European PS Vita unit at PSU towers, we’ve still been a little uncertain as to what ports and slots would be on the European and U.K. PS Vita model and what we’d actually be able to do with each of them.
There also seems to be a fair amount of confusion from a variety of websites. Even IGN appears to have listed the slots incorrectly, stating that the space next to the PS Vita game cartridge slot is a memory card slot when it most certainly isn’t.
To clarify the situation, our Wi-Fi enabled PS Vita model sports the following layout.
As you can see, the memory card slot is on the base of the unit where you can fit in a seriously tiny card that holds up to 32GB of data. This is the card that will house game saves, PSN downloads and personal media. The only card that will fit into this slot is Sony’s official PS Vita memory card.
Next to that is the earphone and mic connector and just to its left is the proprietary multi-use connector, which we’ve been using to connect our PS Vita to PC and to the PS3 with the lead that comes with retail units. You can also use this lead to power up the device.
What’s really interesting about this port is that it is multi-use and though this hasn’t been confirmed, and we haven’t tested it out right this very minute, we believe that a PS Vita AV Cable with red, white and yellow connectors, like the one listed on TTnet.net by China-based Top Sheung Electronic Co., may allow us to output video, something which we certainly hoped for here at PSU but didn’t think would be possible.
On the top of the unit, there are two slots, one for the PS Vita game cards and another for accessories. The Vita game card slot looks about the same size slot as you’d use for Memory Stick Pro Duo card, while the accessory port looks like its custom made. It’s tiny, like a mini-HDMI port. We took the micro SD card out our phone and even that’s too big to slot in.
What we’ve found bizarre is that we’ve actually had to use a flat-head screwdriver to open both of these slots as they are so tightly sealed to the PS Vita unit. Even after opening them, we’ve still had to have our screwdriver handy each time we’ve wanted to open them. Of course, we’ve had a marketing sample, so we’ve got a fingers crossed this isn’t the case with all shipped units; though we’d be interested to hear of anyone else suffers with the same issue.
We’ll have a full hardware review of PS Vita next week. We’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to let you know about that we don’t think has been covered on other websites, so be sure to check back.