Sony PS Vita – Review


More than half a decade ago, Sony unveiled its first endeavor in portable gaming, the PlayStation Portable. Now, we’ve finally got our hands on the successor of the bestselling portable gaming console. Christened the PlayStation Vita, this descendent of the PlayStation Portable family tree is Sony’s take on the 8th generation of gaming. Available in two models, one packing WiFi and the latter packing both, WiFi as well as 3G connectivity, Sony’s latest brainchild of the portable gaming industry has left us in awe. Taking breaks between long gaming hours, we managed to note down enough information to set you drooling. Our unit had a Clear Coat PS Vita screen protector.
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The Insides:
The PlayStation Vita packs some serious punch indeed. Sporting a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and 512MB of system RAM along with a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4+ graphics processing unit, this brilliant gaming device is indeed powerful and has 128MB of memory dedicated to the GPU. Also, this one comes with a Sixaxis Motion Sensor system, in essence, a three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer. With a built-in GPS receiver for the 3G version along with Wi-Fi as mentioned before, the PS Vita also boasts Bluetooth 2.1+EDR connectivity. With Video Output and Video Input enabled, as has been the tradition with Sony’s PlayStation Portable line, the Vita has a battery good enough for 3 to 5 hours of game-play under ideal conditions (muted sound and low brightness levels) and 9 hours of music playback.
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The Hardware:
The PS Vita sports two cameras, both 1.3 megapixels to lend a hand in Augmented Reality gaming. The camera might lack the efficiency and jazz smartphone cameras brag about these days, but then again, it’s a gaming device and not a shutterbug’s dream. Sporting a crystal clear 5-inch OLED Touch Screen that was pretty visible in sunlight too, the PS Vita comes with the usual two-shoulder buttons, a D-pad, the standard PlayStation face buttons and two analog sticks. Also, Sony decided to give the PS Vita a little more than any of its predecessors has ever had and threw in a well-responsive touch panel at the back of the device too, for additional game controls and the like. Sporting stereo speakers, 3.5mm headphone connectivity and microphone input, the PS Vita comes with a storage media slot along with a PS Vita Card slot to expand memory capacities as per the user’s preferences.
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The Software:
For the PS Vita, Sony decided to ditch the good old XrossMediaBar interface that showed up previously on the PSX DVR, the PSP and the PlayStation 3. Instead, the PS Vita comes packed with the new touch-screen friendly LiveArea user interface. Also, the device supports HTML5, cookies and Javascript, skipping out on proprietary Adobe Flash however. Sony has also packed its newest brainchild with the PlayStation Network that enables social networking via the PS Vita.
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…And Everything Else:
The PS Vita we got our hands on came pre-loaded with the Uncharted: Golden Abyss action adventure game on the Vita Card. By developer SCE Bend Studio, this one did manage to spend considerable amount of time hooked on to the PS Vita, resulting in lack of sleep and skipped meals, all of which we don’t regret to the slightest. The game enabled us to exploit every controlling feature that Sony packed into the PS Vita, including the smooth gyroscope, the well responsive touch panel at the rear and the touchscreen to have protagonist Nate climb up and around rocks. Also, the dual analog sticks work great enabling for smoother movement and complicated as it might seem, the PS Vita didn’t take too long to get a hang off. Owing to the extra control features Sony has loaded into the PS Vita, playing games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss is now pretty much a breeze. Also, with WiFi and 3G capabilities enabled, this one’s seemingly close to a tablet too!
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In all, the new PS Vita is more than just a successor to the PSP family. To us, this one’s a new gaming device in itself and sports a whole new character as compared to its predecessors. Sony seems to have hit the nail at the right spot with its latest release, the PS Vita and our hands on experience with it confirms the fact.
Priced reasonably at about $249.00 for the WiFi model and $299.00 for the WiFi+3G model, the Sony PS Vita is the perfect tool to long hours of pleasurable gaming.