Anyone who owns a PSP is well aware of Pandora batteries, which allows you to downgrade the system of the PSP and remove a significant amount of built-in lockouts with ease. This resulted in cross-platform piracy, homebrew, and basically turned the PSP into far more than it was intended for better or worse. Funnily enough Sony spent more time trying to prevent that rather than capitalizing on it for added profit.
At E3, it was revealed that the Playstation Vita will not have an external battery that can be removed as easily. The system’s battery will be difficult to remove and removing it will automatically void the warranty. Furthermore, it will be attached to the handheld’s touch-screen, meaning you take a huge risk of bricking the entire thing.
Though many people firmly believe that they have the right to do whatever they want to hardware that they purchase, it’s also the right of the manufacturer to make it as obscenely difficult as possible. Everyone knows that going into uncharted territory has great risks, including ruining the entire system in a flash.
Of course, it’s well known in all industries that pirates will always find a way. Even with all this, someone will probably find a loophole or an exploit in the system. I give it a week at best. No system is truly unhackable, the more complicated it is, the higher the chance that a minor exploit somewhere can be used to snowball into a royal mess, letting people use the hardware however they wish.
Chris Hernandez
I think it will be easier to play pirated games on this since it uses flash memory for the games. They will just need to make a reader for it then use the software on it to exploit the system.