With each major conference my sens eof that increases.  It may manage as solid niche device, but not sure Sony see a future for themselves in five to ten years time.

The Vita may have performed better 5 years ago, but you can't blame this all on mobile gaming. Sony is trying to market the Vita to the COD fanbase that has never had an interest in handheld gaming, and they haven't given the system any decent amount of support. What could have been the Vita's biggest game wound up being a turd. This isn't just the wrong place at the wrong time, this is a poor job by Sony in almost every regard except the design of the console.

Different division of the company. Those two segments work completely independantly.

Is that a new level of excuses for bad sales?

I want to know this different world 

That's why day an date Sony talked about playstation mobile. Its clear by now that the dedicated handheld game system can sell good numbers but no where near the level of smart phones an tablets. Bluetooth game pads are cheap enough now and many 3rd party companies are making them that moving the PSP type of handheld to be an extension to the living room console and just sell game software on mobile smart phones is the best solution anyway.

A: as a companion device made from here on out, boxed with a living room game console those wanting a dedicated handheld system will have one. So with say the ps4 system cycle near ends only dedicated game handheld system will only ship with the living room system anyway. Other would be smart phones that you can just hook up a wireless game pad to.

B: that way you always get a dedicated handheld from the get go with the living Room console because the game handheld is already included. The PS4 w/PSVita combo software eco system is just the ground floor building block from here on out with playstation portable.

C: always the ability to take your game on the go. When you get away from the living room over. The mobile ver over the internet is also is already there.  Your game handheld is there day one.

Why would you need to make a dedicated handheld out side of shipping with your living room system from now on aside of a replacement . A smart game pad if you will from here on out.

so a world before Aug 2011... 

you know, I understand the cost can be prohibitive (doubly so thanks to the overpriced memory cards), but I really don't understand why the vita is doing as poorly as it is. I mean, look at its exclusives list:

1 - Assassin's creed
2 - Gravity Rush
3 - LittlebigPlanet
4 - Lumines
5 - Killzone
6 - Ragnarok Odyssey
7 - Soul Sacrifice
8 - Tearaway (soon)
9 - Uncharted
10 - Unit 13
11 - Wipeout

Then it has the ports and upgrades:

1 - Disgaea 3
2 - Dragon's Crown
3 - Mortal kombat
4 - Persona 4
5 - Rayman Origins and soon LEgends
6 - Playstation All-Stars
7 - Sly cooper

As well as a tonne of indies. Like, a TONNE!. SO MANY INDIES!

Its biggest strength is also its greatest weakness: its exclusives list is GOOD, but most of its releases are ports of PS3 games and indies. It really is a great system, I have almost 30 games for it already not including the downloads, but I admit that its future outside of Killzone and TearAway doesn't look good. Ah well, it's been worth the money to me.

There have been different factors for why the Vita hasn't done so well up to this point. For one, the price. I really don't know anyone who wants to pay what could be considered console prices for a handheld gaming device, regardless of how much tech is packed into it. That was one of the things that kept the 3DS from selling until Nintendo did an $80 price drop about 6 months into its life. That's not even saying anything about the price of the memory cards for the Vita. Holy crap. Even with a $20 price drop across the board those things are still a bit pricey.

Then there is the advertisement. Sony has done about as well advertising the Vita as Nintendo has with the Wii U. Not everything is able to speak for itself or gets word of mouth going. Sometimes you have to seriously promote your own product and from what I've seen it is not getting the marketing attention Sony needs to give it.

Then we have the games. The Vita does need more of them but that's not the real problem. The real problem is a serious lack of high-quality games that are games you can only get on the Vita. Look at Metacritic for the top 20 rated Vita titles. Out of that list, 15 of those are games you can get on some other platform. Persona 4 Golden is awesome but it's an improved port-over of a game that came out 4 years earlier on the PlayStation 2. Sony should have pushed for Dragon's Crown to be a Vita title exclusively. It needs more titles like Gravity Rush and the upcoming Tearaway.

Sony really needs to give the platform its own identity. It's great to bring along familiar franchises like Killzone and LittleBigPlanet, as long as you can do them right on a handheld, but it needs enough of its own franchises so people don't feel like they're paying for nothing more than a handheld version of a PS3. At this point I feel like most of the awesome features of it are wasted because Sony keeps bringing out games that just don't utilize those features or do so in ways that feel forced. It's like they're having games being developed first and then they find ways to fit the features in when they should be building games to take advantage of those features from the start.

Sony is doing a great job marketing it to be the nr1 PS4 accessory..

yes normally this would be a  joke of mine but this time not...

Oh trust me, I laughed. :P