Takashi Sogabe knows a thing or two about the PS Vita. He should. He designed it. Sogabe, who also designed the Walkman, said at a recent Sony roundtable (via website CVG), “The original design of the PS Vita… was very much thinner than the current retail product. From a designer’s point of view, thinner is better-looking, but the engineers wanted to put all the features in.”
Does that mean the PS Vita will get thinner iterations in the future like the PSP did?
“Maybe it will become thinner in the future, but the engineers would have to come up with a means to do that,” said the designer.
While Sogabe felt that the buttons and the analogue sticks were not in the best position from a design point of view, game publishers thought their location was the best solution.
That wasn’t the only thing Sogabe wanted to change. “As a designer, I wanted to use metal rather than plastic, but because there are a lot of antennae in the body, we couldn’t use metal.”
The PS Vita launched last December in Japan. Read the Kotaku review here.
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