PS Vita battery extenders explored

It’s no secret that the battery life for the PS Vita has come into question, reason being it’s meant to be a portable games console; yet you are limited to how much gameplay you can enjoy while out away from any power source. Let’s give you two examples, you are on a long road trip with no A/C adapter or you are on a long-haul flight; after several hours despair will set in.

Sony told us battery life for their newest handheld games console would be around 3 to 5 hours for gaming. An article here thought they would test this in a real-life test. In the first hour of playing a game the battery still showed 100 percent, 10 minutes later this dropped down to 85 percent. 2 hours and 26 minutes saw the battery indicator fall to 50 percent, 25 percent happened after 3 hours and 29 minutes and after just 4 hours and 33 minutes the Vita was down to 10 percent. The battery finally gave out after 4 hours and 44 minutes. We have to wonder if these results would be different once the battery has had a few full charge cycles?

Now there are ways to try and conserve the battery on the PS Vita, but there are other alternatives to extend your game time on the device by way of battery extenders. Firstly there’s the Nyko Power Grip, which we recently discussed. Just to remind you, you can increase the battery life by up to 15 hours.

Sony has an Official Portable Charger for the Vita and is said to provide around 4-7 extra gaming, which equates to 1.5 times the amount as the internal battery. This device is already available, as it can also give extra power to a number of other devices; price is $49.99.

Next up we have a high capacity external battery for the Vita handled system. Amazon currently has this listed as not available and they also have no details on price or how much it will extend the battery for. However, we expect the price to be around $50 or cheaper and should provide several more hours of gaming.

It’s not ideal having to use these other devices to extend the life of the PS Vita battery, but for some gamers they will not have a choice. Will this issue be a deal breaker for you?