Sony has said today that their highly-anticipated PlayStation Vita handheld will hit Japan on December 17th.For 3G connectivity, Sony has selected NTT DoCoMo, and prices will be 980 yen ($13 USD) for 20 hours of prepaid time or 4,980 yen ($64 USD) for 100 hours. Sony has also revealed the battery life of the console, which is horrendous, at just 3-5 hours (depending on usage) and recharge time takes a full 2:40 from 0% to 100%.
The Vita will run on an ARM Cortex A9 quad-core processor and be powered by a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU.
Featuring a 5-inch capacitive multitouch OLED screen (with 16 million colors), the device will be 7.16 by 0.73 by 3.28 inches.
Despite rumors that Sony would skimp out on RAM, the Vita has 512MB memory and 128MB VRAM in its graphics processor.
The rear camera will be capable of 60fps and 640×480 resolution or 120fps at 320×240 resolution.
Sony says the Vita will playback MP3, AAC, WAV (Linear PCM) files and MPEG-4 video including H.264 AVC encodings in high, main, or baseline profiles.
Finally, Sony has announced the 28 launch games for the Japanese release, which are available here: Vita launch games
