The PlayStation Vita (プレイステーション・ヴィータ, officially abbreviated PS Vita) is a handheld game console manufactured and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment.
It is the successor to the PlayStation Portable as part of the PlayStation series.
The PS Vita was released in Japan and parts of Asia on December 17, 2011, in Europe, North America, South America and Singapore on February 22, 2012 and in Australia on February 23, 2012.
It primarily competes with the Nintendo 3DS as part of the eighth generation of gaming.
Software for the PlayStation Vita is distributed on a proprietary flash memory card called "PlayStation Vita card" rather than on Universal Media Discs (UMDs) as used by the PlayStation Portable.
The handheld includes two analog sticks, an OLED multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, and supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and optional 3G. Internally, the Vita features a four-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and a four-core SGX543MP4+ graphics processing unit, as well as LiveArea software as its main user interface, which succeeds the XrossMediaBar.
