Near is dead, no great loss

The Near service on the Vita has been halted, which will come as no great loss to most Vita owners. You can't delete the app, presumably so that games don't start breaking down, but if you go to Settings, "Delete All 'near' Data" you can free up some memory card space.

Having done that, I'm now trying to remember exactly what I used it for, and a few shared puzzles aside, I really don't recall. It was fun in the early days to see other Vita owners "near" me, but was otherwise an unexplored gimmick by most users. Despite travelling far and wide, I never had WiFi on, or a 3G model, so perhaps never got the best from it.

But "near" was never going to be as fun as Nintendo's Street Pass, it's just a shame that Sony didn't try to evolve it. Some owners are still rather fond of near, with a few mournful tales of its passing around the web. Feel free to comment if you have some near-love stories

Naturally, we can expect a rash of stories about "another nail in the Vita coffin"  but it makes no practical difference to our little Vita lives. I do wonder if the homebrew or indie app crowd would be allowed to come up with something better, but we all know Sony's stance on that!