VITA IS DOOMED!

Lets hope its not too long because the vita's digital services are arguably its biggest features. The problem otherwise is that you've got all these cool game but very few of them warrant full price retail purchases. Nintendo had the same problem with alot of 3DS games like nintendogs, pilot wings, resident evil mercinaries and startfox 64 remake. They'll also be a ton of games which are'nt gonna release outisde of PSN, they'd suffer if people are reluctant to buy  overpriced memory cards and developers will withdraw support of the VIta as a result.

Wait a few weeks and we will se some third party cards.

Damn proprietary formats!!
Couldn't they just put in a regular SDHC card drive?
32GB for 50$ sounds a lot better than 120$. :/

I think I read  somewhere this was anti-piracy related (though maybe the anti piracy justification was actually regarding the embeded battery).

But you still have to send the console to have them replace it from what im reading?

That's kind of a lot. Perhaps Vita will not be a launch buy after all. That doesn't mean I don't like the system though. I just don't ever buy systems at launch.

Do you have to install games on the Vita?

Only if you want to download games. If you buy games on cartridges, the cartridges will hold both save data and eventual DLC. So if you don't want to download complete games from the PS Store, memory cards are pretty much unneeded.

Unless you plan on buying a lot of PSP games, since the Vita can't play UMDs. Having never owned a PSP (and definitely not owning one now, thanks to the digital downloads of the games), I will probably be picking up some PSP games, which means you'll need a memory card.

I think the memory cards are a little expensive, but they're Japanese prices, so they might be cheaper whenever the Vita makes its debut in the west.