If Sony Does Ever Make a PS Vita 2, It'll Probably Need Replaceable Batteries

Well we could just start calling the new streaming device the Vita 2 b/c I can't remember what it's called anyway. And probably sell equally well. 😂

If the Vita 2 had a replaceable battery it would be proprietary and cost exactly $1 less than the entire system. 🤑

Well, it looks like EU is coming with something meaningful after long long time. 🙂 Integrated batteries is the most pain in the ass in last few years. With lifetime of butterfly and capacity of teaspoon it is irritating to disassemble whole thing just to replace battery. Unfortunately it is not made on DualSense, because that battery is the biggest fail SONY ever made.

EU did us (all [even the US and other countries]) a solid with this. This has nothing to do with handheld game machines -it has everything to do with phones and the action to let consumers change their own gd batteries and do repairs.

@djlard
Mine have been fine, have two.
Just swap them every time I've had a warning battery is low, never seems particularly shorter than when I was swapping Dual Shock 4s.

you can replace the battery on all sony products they are screwed together not glued together like phones and laptops

what sony need to do is make official batteries available for sale and not at a price gouging level.

the cheap knock offs on ebay can be unreliable at best and a rip off at worst

Great news reporting Khayl.
This is the story the world needs.

@trev666 yes to both posts. But the problem is sony cant even source a battery that lasts more than 6 months or so. My dual sense is permantly plugged in as it holds the charge for about an hour or so. Maybe they should look into that first other wise we will be buying new batterys every other month 🤣.

The PSP has replaceable batteries. Being able to take a few spare cells on a long trip was a godsend.

This has always been the downside of handhelds. Eventually, years down the line, to use them it will require sitting next to a wall outlet.

Xbox actually has it right with their controllers. They take standard batteries, but also accept a rechargeable battery pack - let’s stick with this.

Tho the issues with having replaceable batteries is that everytime you drop your device, the battery falls out and you have to put it back in and close the lid. And everytime that happens, the lid gets weaker or could break where you can no longer close the lid.

You can replace the battery on the Vita can’t you?

@CutchuSlow

Not with a Xbox controller, at least not mine. Just getting that cover off requires Herculean effort.

@IamJT

I’m not sure about this, possibly, but it it wasn’t designed as user-replaceable. Some early models of PSP had a user replaceable battery; I believe Sony sold their own first-party batteries.

@Vacuumator yea maybe not designed to be pop in and pop out but I just went on iFixit and their walkthrough to replace a vita battery is no more complicated than replacing a ps4 hard drive.

@Vacuumator just a heads up you can get a little separator tool that makes it super easy for a couple bucks.

@IamJT on PSP you could replace batteries but Vita you couldn't.

@Vacuumator I have an xbox controller and had my batteries fall out a few times.

Good hopefully they can do the same for controllers

I have a 3rd party spare battery and the Sony original for my PSP 3000.
Very useful to have a spare one - nothing worse than running low on power when trying to start a Worms Open Warfare match!

Vita kind of feels like it SHOULD have had a replaceable battery but as mobile phones went to sealed units, so did the Vita. That said, the Vita's battery lasts a l-o-n-g time, even now! Suppose it dates back to the days when Sony used to over-engineer stuff.

As an aside from the Vita (NEVER give up hope of a PSP 3!) I have to say that my original Sony PS3 controllers are STILL charging & last a long time when charged. I dread to think how old they are?

I like chargeable batteries in our controllers. I don't like that MS puts in normal batteries in the box so I favour Sonys way of providing charagable batteries as MS way seems like they cheapened out to get people to buy the chargeable battery separately. But they had the right idea allowing people to remove it and swap it with a fresh one.

Maybe one day the Vita and controllers battery will swell up and we would need to either get rid of the controller or open it up to remove them. I'd rather just swap my battery out with a fresh new one with better life. But Sony should provide the chargeable battery in the box.

Never had a single problem with a battery in a controller or handheld and I’m a pretty heavy user. Don’t know how people manage to kill there’s. Still, always good to have the option to swap batteries out if needed so I’m happy about this.

@feral1975 I have 4 and all of them holds around 5 hours, playing or not.

@CutchuSlow Then don't drop your device

@Gabrielmpf lol I always drop everything.

I recently opened up a bunch of DualShock 3 controllers to see if I could do a case swap on one of them but discovered Sony changed the design so much over the years that it wasn't that simple. Even the plastic construction for the case - it went from shiny piano black to more of a matte. The 2006-2010 controllers seem to be built the best whereas the coloured editions (I have one from 2012 in blue) are cheaply made in a way that's actually pretty shameful. Not the same level of durability at all. The analogue sticks on later ones seem to wear out and acquire dead spots/stiffness of movement so easily, rendering them useless for precise inputs as one might need for an FPS or racing game.

Anyway, my point is that all of them have something in common - it's really not difficult to change the battery, and you don't have to fully disassemble the controller and remove it from the case to do so. It's 5 Philips head screws to get the back off, then the battery is one lead and usually has little plastic clips to make it sit in the right spot (later ones used an adhesive strip and a much cheaper battery, which is why I assume my older ones still hold charge while the newer one doesn't).

I wish the Vita had had the same construction, but it doesn't. It should have. The one Vita I opened years ago that has a failed battery was so fragile that the terminals came right off the board. It's very well built in some ways, not so much others.

@feral1975 same. Probably only affects you if you’re doing a daily marathon. I can only dream with a 9-5 job

I’m more tech savvy than the average person but no expert, but I’ve not had an issue replacing any of the batteries in Sony products I have owned. The vita def could have been easier as the ribbon cable for the back touchpad is a little scary. DS4 battery was super simple. Going the PSP route though would be very nice for ease of doing it for the average parent/kid. The New 3DS has a really good way to have an easily replaceable battery but not sacrificing the clean look. But definitely a good idea to not let companies go the smartphone route of soldering everything and having to do the heated workbench stuff for batteries. That sounds like such a nightmare to work on….

In mobile phones it will greatly reduce the waterproofing.

How did replaceable batteries work out for PSP? Good luck finding ones that still work.

OMG FINALLY!!!! I thought this would never happen!! Consumers have lamented that everything we buy is a disposable POS ever since Apple and their stupid hardwired batteries started the trend in the whole electronics industry to save a buck. It was bad enough when it was phones, but then whole laptops and everything else became 2-3 year rentals, let alone smaller items like controllers.

@HonestHick Plenty of industrial tools are waterproof and have replaceable batteries, though it'll reduce the quest for ultimate thinness. Just needs the caseback held on by screws with a replaceable gasket between. Look on the bright side, though, you'll get your Elite V3 soon! OTOH we've been had on the Edge. Edge 2 will fix the problem and will only be a few years away now. And what about VR Sense?

Heck I'll have to buy a new phone next year because of battery wear and with this I could have kept me for a looooong time. Maybe I can hold off a few years and get a one with a replaceable battery and stop constantly buying new ones....

Man this changes everything to....exactly where it was a decade ago before Apple messed up the world. But you're....what's the Apple version of "pony"?

There's so many things I either recently bought or will have to buy that I'm now regretting.....

@CutchuSlow We all lived with devices with replaceable batteries just fine until Apple made it "trendy" to be "thin" so it "requires" soldered batteries that conveniently makes the device disposable every few years. I don't recall battery doors popping off everywhere on devices made from the 60's through the early 00's. Or a single Samsung phone, ever. Unless the battery bloated and ripped it off, which is better than the batteries bloating on my newer ones that rip the screen off instead....

@Beeeee-AHH-eer Just get a battery charger and accompanying batteries, i have never used an official Xbox charger pack

@Ludacritz My original Sony one still works and I bought some from eBay in Nov 2022 which work perfectly too.

@Kidfried "As someone who's actually excited for that streaming device and will buy it... even I don't know the name."

Thanks, that did make me feel better. And motivated me to go look up the name, which it doesn't have yet, unless they actually release it as Project Q.😝

I'm going w/ "PS5 CloudStream" b/c it doesn't stream from the cloud, so it seems like a Sony name as "PS Vita TV" didn't actually play any tv channels, or even Netflfix. It also sounds like a Decepticon so that's cool, even if it is misleading. 😁

It''s funny but with all the furore over a potential new handheld from Sony and it turns out to be an overpriced streaming tablet.

Meanwhile the PS aficionados still wait patiently for PSP 3 (never should have gone with the Vita name)

@Kidfried sounds like a medical condition (ouch!)

@NEStalgia Apple always included the battery into the chassis. Samsung used to not do it. Then of course copied apple’s hardware, cause thats Samsung Galaxy marketing for you. For 1 year mock apple about it, next year copy the design. Apple marches to their own drum, be it for better or worse. Google and every other phone maker don’t and didn’t have to do it. My mom’s iPhone is 6 years old and has no battery issue, once the phone has any issue with it, i will buy her a new one cause she will get over 7 years worth of upgrades. My house has 3 Nintendo Switches in it and not a single battery problem. So while i suppose this is good news for someone. I have no issues with knowing how battery cells work and how to charge them to maintain their strength of over years. Yes the PS Edge controller. Worst battery life on any controller at any price point i have ever seen. I use it on SF6 and it drains in like 3 hours I swear. Also does this mean MS got it right with their controllers that have removable batteries and 40 hour battery life? PS where you been at man? You missed the whole ABK drama, you did that on purpose, didn’t you? Smart man hahaha

@Kidfried DualStream is good. Sounds like a jet ski. Ain't nothing wrong w/ a jet ski. 👍

Though they should just call it the PS5 Gamepad b/c reasons. 😉
PS5 PlayPad is good too. Play anywhere. Though it does sound a bit like a Jakk's Pacific kids toy. "PS5 On Screen Mobile Controller" is probably the most accurate. Now I need a name long enough for the initials to be KOS-MOS. 😊

The EU has its pros and cons, but implementing mandatory replacable batteries as well as a usb C charger standard is very consumer friendly.

@djlard Integrated batteries won't go away. The batteries need to be "easily replaceable by the user" which expanded as not glued to the body and not requiring special tools to replace.

@HonestHick Yeah, I started buying Samsungs because they did the opposite of the crApple. Loved the replaceable batteries. Loved having an actual headphone jack. Utterly hate that Samsung has been copying every awful move Apple makes. Tried to switch to LG or something but of course they bowed out. Ugh! Stupid crApple. #notmysamsung.

The thing is every phone maker and the like wanted to do it once they saw Apple doing it and making it cool because it guarantees built in obsolecense. You can't keep using your phone for years and years because the battery is designed to be strained and lose chariging capacity in a few years. So you're guaranteed to have to keep upgrading on their treadmill on their terms at fixed intervals.

Of course that's EU's point...

Apple used "cool" to do something bad for everyone and make it good (we've of course seen the "we slow your phone down to make the battery not blink out as it ages"-gate....which of course wouldn't be needed if you could just replaced the battery.

I've been here, through the ABK drama! Well split here and pxb anyway. You just got used to scrolling past my text walls

We will likely never see another Sony Handheld. They simply don’t have enough studios to make content for it. Throw in how expensive game development is, along with how long it takes to make games and it just wouldn’t make sense for Sony. Switch is perfect cause Nintendo doesn’t mind it docked to a TV with less than cutting edge performace. Sony cares how the PS consoles look and play on TV.

@NEStalgia Honestly i didn’t see much from you. Thats strange I normally look for your post. Thing is Apple has these things called retail stores, and if you go there they will replace your battery. Is it free? Of course not. But you are far from forced to get a new phone. One thing i think people are holding onto is the older days of tech where you buy something say like a DVD and have it for 14 years. No consumer tech company wants that anymore. Apple supports 7 years of software updates and security patches for its phones. Samsung you rarely ever see anyone on the current OS and security patches, so they want you to buy a new phone just to get the new OS which is insane, ok back to batteries. Batteries are the one part of the mobile tech world that hasn’t advanced in tech. Mobile processors advance to draw less power from the same battery tech of the last 20 years. So the battery is really the largest drawback in design, so its failure point is largely on how optimized the phone or device is around it. No one does that better than Apple and in video games no one does it worse than Sony. Take a look at TV’s when i was a kid your parents bought a 300lbs TV and it lasted until you left your parents house for college, come back from college and it still works. Today’s LCD’s and LED’s last 3-6 years before pixel burnouts, white screen, etc etc etc etc etc. you can’t have them serviced like old school TV’s, my mom had her Maytag washer and dryer’s serviced 4-5 times and they still run, 20 years strong. Todays washer and dryers once they break they want you to recycle them and buy new. It’s not a Apple thing, it’s a consumer tech and electronics thing. Gotta please the shareholders and they don’t make much money fixing parts nearly as well as selling a whole new device. If you have the money for it, it’s nice you are always on the cutting edge of performance, however no matter how new your phone is, it still has a battery in it that has had no major breakthroughs in years.

@HonestHick wanted to share my favorite quote from MS in the ABK deal i watched, CEO of MS said gaming has always been a core of MS, that they were making Flight Simulator for windows before they even made office. Like i knew that, but kind of forgot. He doubled down on MS always being in video games as they see it as the most important form of media consumption. 😊

@HonestHick I'd never miss a chance to watch the world burn. I've been busy so my posts have been lighter duty, plus after the lion tamer and two headed lady packed up from the trial, not much can really be so exciting....

I think the EU's point here is that we need to by force of law get back to a world where you buy your DVD player and hold onto it for 14 years. The tech companies may want you to just rent your stuff for a few years and throw it away. Consumers shouldn't want that. And if we're pushing "green", or really, even just "sensible use of stuff" that idea needs to die a rapid, painful, public death. It's not how it was 15 years ago, and it's not how it should be 3 years from now. We should consider the "disposable everything" era a fad driven by wall street and forget about it as fast as possible. If it takes EU telling companies "no" then so it is. And that's also EU's point on the easily user replaceable batteries. Telling customer to go drive half an hour to an hour to a company store to pay the company to change your battery for you then drive half an hour to an hour back isn't ok. Even if you could ship it to them it still makes no sense sending you stuff around if you could just replace the battery like used to be normal on 100% of things with batteries prior to circa 2010. Heck, Switch is a decent model. $20 says the Switch (OG, not the Lite) already meets EU criteria, it's just not advertised as such. It's just a few triwing screws and a small connector inside. Lite is another story. A screwdriver is fine (just ask Sony ), spudgers are not fine. Soldering irons are not fine. And detatching hairline ribbon cables are not fine.

Quite frankly I still expect a TV to last 20 years. If it doesn't I consider it a total failure of a product. Sure it's not the current, but it should still work. Other than my newest gaming 4k setup I haven't bought new displays in maybe 15 years. They all work fine. And it wasn't all sunshine and lollipops in the CRT days. Especially Samsungs. I had 2 tubes blow, and viewsonic Trinitron copy fail fast. A good one today should last 30 years. A bad one back then also barely lasted 7, except it was 300 pounds to junk it. A bad product is a bad product then and now.

"Durable goods" are an economic indicator, and used to mean things bought a few times in life, now it means a few years. We need to put the genie back in the bottle, by force, and do it yesterday.

But still, I think that's part of EU's point here, an attempt to FORCE tech/consumer products to turn back the clock. This happend when cheap Chinese garbage happened. I never understood it. I expected everything I buy to last until I'm dead and blamed myself for everything that kept breaking. I never bought into the disposable economy, I know why business did, but what I'm amazed about is that government's didn't force it by law prior to now. It was always a bad plan. I basically only buy commercial/industrial equipment for that very reason. I refuse to buy almost any consumer junk that doesn't last most of my life. This is a new thing, not the way it always was, as you said. And now's the time (albeit still too late) to fix it.

I'm far from a "greenie", like, really far. But there's certain common sense you don't need to be a a green Red to realize is simply the logical way to do things, and sometime around the late 90's early 00's business realized they can scrap sense, and governments have taken 20 years to respond it appears. While also singing the green mantra, which is hysterical. I've said many times, if we're worried about the "climate" while they're pushing travel, airlines, commutes, and endlessly disposable consumer products, we should all just be lighting piles of tires on fire, it doesn't matter, everything is just for show.

@viktorcode so where is the problem to make some lid as it was before?

@NEStalgia i do my part in recycling. I also buy apple products which are made of recycled materials and they are 80% as a company of zero emissions. I don’t try and get nerdy with it. It just makes logical sense to put my beer can’s and bottles in the recycle and not our trash. Ok boring stuff over. I agree with most of what you say, they are fair and sensible idea’s. But playing devils advocate here what do we do with the fashion people that want the latest iphone and Samsung phones in the newest colors? Or the newest screen sizes, god that’s dumb thats even a thing. You get the point, then there is the people like i said like my mom who i bought her first iPhone for almost 6 years ago and she hasn’t upgraded or had a battery issue. When that phone is no longer updatable or say the battery goes, she don’t need a new battery replacement, she needs a new phone with a better camera and processor, etc. i think thats a more than fair upgrade. Most TV’s say they are built to last. I have two LG oled’s now and i hope to get my money’s worth and more out of them. They look great but they are paper thin and i am sure heat and other things break them down faster. Time will tell. I expect big tech to fight this idea from the UK, cause it will make them redesign chassis and have to rework the internal components. Not sure if they can fight it legally anyways, but if they can i am sure they will. I love tech to much to wait 10 years to upgrade my phone, watch and tablet. But i don’t do 1-2 year upgrades anymore, in the beginning tech in the mobile area was growing so fast a 2 year old camera felt ancient cause of the rapid improvements coming yearly. That has slowed down now and i am happy with most of my devices for 3 years. Knowing they will resell or recycle my older ones. Or we pass them down to family or if it’s in mint condition i might sell it as i have mentioned in the pass. Choices for people is good tho, i can’t stress that enough on these sites. People either love or hate Gamepass, or digital needs to kill physical, all the conflicts of why one way is the only way and i want gamers and consumers to have choices. If that provides that then i am all for it. Peoples budgets and reasons for buying and consuming things are all different. I have almost $4,000 dollars in audio in my media room. Most don’t care about sound that much or can afford it. But when i have people tell me PS not having Dolby atmos is no big deal. I laugh and just avoid the conversation cause i can’t let them hear both consoles in my media room to know there’s a difference and a reason Atmos is regarded industry standard.most consumers aren’t high end and most aren’t low end. That happy middle is what tech companies should be striving to keep happy and give the most options to. Not to sound mean, but you get what you pay for in life. If you buy cheap and replace stuff every year, thats a problem vs saving up enough money to get something that can last a little longer. Amazon is the worst about selling cheap stuff from china that breaks 10 days after the warranty. What strain does that put into the environment? Probably far worse then upgrading and recycling old phone parts. Man, i sure did miss our talks there for a week or so. While we might not always agree on said topic. I think we give honest opinions and learn from one another in some ways. Glad your back buddy. 😊

@sanderson72 Appreciate the comment. It could just be my PSP then, it kills batteries. A couple years ago I went through three before I decided something was up, then of course I turn to Google which led me to others having similar issue. Figured it was everybody. Enjoy

@Ludacritz These were the backup batteries we got (had 3 of them to breathe a bit more life into the Radiant Red, Vibrant Blue and Silver Slim & Lite 3000s!)
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/194297638231