Sony has announced that the updated version of its powerful but not exactly top-selling Vita handheld game console will be coming to the U.S. this spring. It arrived in Japan late last year, but has yet to come to American shores.
The PlayStation Vita Slim sports a number of improvements over the original: updated buttons, better battery life and a thinner, lighter chassis. There's also a gig of internal memory and an ordinary micro-USB port instead of the Vita's original proprietary port.
Unfortunately, it also does away with what was perhaps the Vita's marquee feature: the brilliant 5-inch OLED screen. Now an ordinary LCD, the high-resolution display should still look nice, just not superb.
The new handheld will make its U.S. debut bundled with "Borderlands 2" and an 8 GB memory card for $200, making it slightly — but not vastly — cheaper than its predecessor. No date was specified; "spring" is as precise as it gets right now.