If you missed out on the Italian deal for Sony’s red hot portable console at £141 late last year, don’t be disappointed.

You can purchase the Sony Playstation Vita gaming console, the PCH-1003, from Tesco’s eBay outlet for a mere £159, a far cry from the £219 that it commanded at lanch. It is a refurbished model but comes with a one year warranty.

The quality of the hardware that equips the Vita is pleasantly surprising for a device that cheap. It runs a quad-core Cortex-A9 system on chip with a quad-cpre PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU solution with 128MB dedicated memory.

There’s also a 5in OLED 960 x 544 capacitive display, 512MB of RAM, 512MB of ROM, a 4-way D-pad and a touch sensitive area at the back, a front facing and rear cameras, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a card reader that takes expensive proprietary cards and more.

Do read our review of the Sony Playstation Vita and find out why we consider it to be more than just a decent piece of gaming kit. 2013 is likely to be a very interesting year for portable gaming with the arrival of the Archos GamePad, Nvidia’s Shield platform and a slew of white-labelled Android gaming devices.