[to11mtm]

I have a Vita, and it killed me on the Gaming UX side. But aside from that here's why the Vita failed to me.

- I hated the touchpad on the back. I'm in that subset of people who thinks the original 'Texas' Xbox controller is a good size for my hands, so I know that's very subjective. But I could never get comfortable with it.

- Using it doesn't feel as smooth as my times with a (3)DS or even the original PSP.

- Speaking Sony killed a shitton of goodwill with their winddown of the PSP for me. Yeah that's a nitpick but I think others had it as well which impacted uptake of the Vita.

- Proprietary memory cards that are too expensive. At least with memory stick I had a couple of options. Yeah I get that the new formats were to help with the piracy issues, but then making your proprietary cards so expensive just makes me feel soured.

- Loading times on the Vita still remind me of playing on a console with a hard drive.

That being said Nintendo has a lot more experience both from a hardware and software perspective so they are very hard to out-compete. The biggest indicator of that to me is the dearth of titles that are easy to do a few minutes on with a Switch/etc versus the kinds of games I have on my Vita which typically are better for something like a long flight or car ride.

[kick]

- Using it doesn't feel as smooth as my times with a (3)DS or even the original PSP.

I think the biggest difference is that Vita wasn't clicky; hit a button on a Nintendo handheld, and you get a very pleasant tactile sensation. Pressing a button on Vita felt like you were smooshing the button, which isn't a great experience. The PS3 controller ran into a similar problem because of the analog face buttons it had, but it's not as noticeable on bigger controllers.