I can't see Sony getting back into portables after seeing how they let the Vita wither on the vine and die. It was a very powerful system for its time and did decently faithful renditions of games running on consoles of the time. It is really too bad: the Vita is great. I just bought one a short while back now that it has been hacked wide open. With an affordable SDCard & adapter in place of Sony's proprietary and expensive memory cards, the Vita is an emulation powerhouse on top of all the original content made for it.
Nintendo's portable efforts have been honed since the Gameboy. The content really helps sell those handhelds and keeps people glued to them. Games like Animal Crossing ("Gotta play every day or I get weeds in my town!") or Pokemon ("Gotta get 'em all.") are like crack. And a lot of their other content is simply top notch.
I have a Vita, and it killed me on the Gaming UX side. But aside from that here's why the Vita failed to me.
- I hated the touchpad on the back. I'm in that subset of people who thinks the original 'Texas' Xbox controller is a good size for my hands, so I know that's very subjective. But I could never get comfortable with it.
- Using it doesn't feel as smooth as my times with a (3)DS or even the original PSP.
- Speaking Sony killed a shitton of goodwill with their winddown of the PSP for me. Yeah that's a nitpick but I think others had it as well which impacted uptake of the Vita.
- Proprietary memory cards that are too expensive. At least with memory stick I had a couple of options. Yeah I get that the new formats were to help with the piracy issues, but then making your proprietary cards so expensive just makes me feel soured.
- Loading times on the Vita still remind me of playing on a console with a hard drive.
That being said Nintendo has a lot more experience both from a hardware and software perspective so they are very hard to out-compete. The biggest indicator of that to me is the dearth of titles that are easy to do a few minutes on with a Switch/etc versus the kinds of games I have on my Vita which typically are better for something like a long flight or car ride.
- Using it doesn't feel as smooth as my times with a (3)DS or even the original PSP.
I think the biggest difference is that Vita wasn't clicky; hit a button on a Nintendo handheld, and you get a very pleasant tactile sensation. Pressing a button on Vita felt like you were smooshing the button, which isn't a great experience. The PS3 controller ran into a similar problem because of the analog face buttons it had, but it's not as noticeable on bigger controllers.
Nintendo's portable efforts have been honed since the Gameboy. The content really helps sell those handhelds and keeps people glued to them. Games like Animal Crossing ("Gotta play every day or I get weeds in my town!") or Pokemon ("Gotta get 'em all.") are like crack. And a lot of their other content is simply top notch.