Sony negotiating Vita Flash support, defends proprietary memory cards

In an interview with Japanese gaming site Impress Watch, translated by Andriasang, members of Sony's Vita development staff discussed the system's multimedia capabilities, revealing some new information and reiterating the reasoning behind the expensive proprietary memory cards.

In the interview conducted by Japanese tech journalist Munechika Nishida, Sony's senior VP Yoshio Matsumoto, Division 2 Software development head Muneki Shimada, and product division chief Hiromi Wakai discussed some of Vita's key multimedia features.

Despite Adobe announcing that it would no longer support development of its mobile Flash-player and it previously having been confirmed that the handheld would not support Flash at launch, Shimada said that Sony had not given up hope of bringing Flash support to Vita and that negotiations were continuing.

With regard to video support, Shimada said that Vita will not support 1080p output, at least initially. He highlighted that the Vita display supports 544 pixels vertical resolution, so anything above the supported 720p display would be subject to being scaled down anyway. Shimada also said that via Vita's Remote Play feature video will be converted to a higher resolution, though he noted that this is dependent on the PS3 which will handle the video encoding for Remote Play.

Shimada reiterated that the custom memory cards required for Vita's storage of game data, patches and download content were chosen to ensure security and stability. The US pricing of the proprietary cards, that range in size from 4GB to 32GB, was recently unveiled to the consternation of many a gamer.

Finally, on the subject of PC and Mac connectivity, a utility to enable a PC to recognise the Vita as a mass storage device was promised prior to the Vita's launch with a Mac version coming in the "not-so-distant future".

PS Vita launches in Japan on December 17 and in North American and Europe on February 22.