The PlayStation Vita is an amazing little handheld. The screen is gorgeous, the processing power is almost equal to the PlayStation 3, it has dual analog sticks, and even optional 3G. It could be the greatest handheld gaming system ever made.

Except Sony is trying as hard as it can to screw it up.

Sony isn’t just the company that makes PlayStation games. It’s also the company that makes a lot of movies, music, television shows, and electronics. They’re all different divisions of Sony and those divisions don’t work together except in very limited and specific ways, but they’re all still under the Sony umbrella. Because Sony Computer Entertainment is part of the same family that has Sony Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment, the company is much more interested in keeping its electronic devices from letting people steal media. And because members of that family are also members of the MPAA and RIAA and as such don’t understand the technology better than “pirates are the worst evil in the world, we need to stop them any way possible and users don’t really have any right to enjoy the media they’ve bought anyway,” they’ve screwed up the PlayStation Vita. If you want to use it as a gaming system, it’s great. If you want to use the various media features that Sony included, you better be ready to drop some cash and sacrifice a few animals to the copy protection gods in order to it to work. The worst part is that the Vita is even more locked down than the PlayStation Portable.

You probably already know about the proprietary USB cable and memory card. They’re obnoxious measures used specifically to prevent users from putting anything on the system Sony doesn’t want. Ostensibly, according to a Sony rep I spoke with last year, this is to prevent people from cheating. Realistically, it’s to prevent people from putting any media on the system or using any homebrew functions. Effectively, it makes the PS Vita utterly horrible to watch movies or listen to music on.

The Sony Content Manager is an ugly, useless app that’s there only to remind you that Sony has you by the balls. You can’t drag files from your computer to your Vita. You can’t put files on the memory card, because there aren’t any card readers for it. Instead, you have to load the Sony Content Manager Assistant on your computer, set folders in the program, then connect using the Vita’s Content Manager software and download the files using the Vita itself. It is the most backwards way I’ve seen to put media on a device that can play media.

This alone is intolerably obnoxious, but Sony only further messes it up by making such irritating mistakes in the system’s design. The battery life is short and you can’t replace it. You can’t read Web pages while a game is paused in the background. The PS Store library is incomplete and doesn’t let you download any PSOne Classics. The 3G data plan is obscenely overpriced for what you get (though that’s partially AT&T’s fault).

Do you want to know the tiniest but most obnoxious issue yet is? The one that pushed me over the edge from saying “It’s just Sony being Sony” to saying “What the crap?” The optional cradle. A $20 charging cradle you can put you Vita on to charge and show videos. It’s expensive for a chunk of plastic that holds up the Vita, but that’s understandable because all cradles are like that. The really bad part is this:

It uses the goddamn Sony proprietary connector!

The connector is already on the cradle, so you can hook up the Vita. There is absolutely no reason for there to be a connector in the back instead of a standard USB port. When you get a dock for an iPhone or iPad, you get it with the assumption that you can charge and perhaps connect to your computer your Apple device without needing the cable Apple included with it. It’s seen as an extra charger, something that lets you know you have a place to charge your device at home while still being able to take the cable with you to use at your office or anywhere else you might need it.

The cradle doesn’t even come with a simple power cable. If you want to use it, you need the cable the Vita came with. This is a $20 product. You don’t get an extra charger or an extra way to connect your Vita to a computer. For that, you need to buy another proprietary USB cable, and spend another $15 to get the functionality you should have gotten for that extra $20. It is obscene, arrogant, and worst of all completely and utterly pointless. There is no reason for the proprietary USB connection at all. If Sony uses some special copy protection circuitry, it can easily be fit in the cradle. If a gamer spends $20 on the cradle, he’s already a dedicated customer who spent at least $270 on the Vita.

The galling thing is that none of these are dealbreakers (unless you want to use your Vita for media playing more than gaming). It’s just a huge pile of irritating, easily preventable, utterly pointless issues with the Vita, entirely thanks to Sony make bizarre and idiotic decisions. The cradle is just one of the most overlooked and completely stupid problems among many.