With the rise of bite-sized mobile gaming happening at an alarming rate, and Nintendo seeming to be doing everything they can to ensure that 3DS struggles as much as possible, it’s hard to know where to stand with Vita. After mixed results with PSP (a lot of hardware shifted, but a lack of content and some piracy issues translates to relvatively poor software sales), you could forgive Sony for treating its successor with caution, but it only takes a few minutes with Vita to see that this isn’t a device treated with caution, this is an all-out assault. They’ve tried before, even with the ‘portable entertainment hub’ approach of PSP, to be all things to all people. The difference this time is they seem to have got everything right.
The first thing you can’t help noticing is the size of the device. It’s substantially bigger on its face side than even a 1000 model PSP. The screen only covers an extra half an inch across its diagonal measurement, but it feels a lot more. It’s a lot thinner than even the slim model PSP though, with a set of dimensions that make it feel more like a smartphone with its huge face side and pocket-friendly lack of depth than a traditional handheld gaming device’s hefty bulk.
Perhaps more surprisingly is its weight, or rather the lack of it. I don’t have figures to hand, but it feels a little lighter than a PSP 3000, and certainly closer to iPhone weight than 3DS. If you had a pocket big enough to comfortably accomodate its load then it’s probable you wouldn’t even notice it was there.
In your hands it feels like a very nice bit of kit. The decision to go with two analogue sticks on the base unit from day one is most welcome. The sticks themselves are a lot smaller than you might expect. With proper analogue sticks that tilt rather than the slide pad mechanism favoured by the original PSP and more recently with 3DS, it’s important that they don’t protrude too much from the device. As a result the sticks are incredibly small, maybe a third of the size of those on a Dualshock 3 at the most, barely noticeable under the thumb and with a very small control radius. It’s slightly odd at first, but within a few minutes you’ve already adjusted to the subtle movement required to accurately control things.
The touch screen and rear touch panel both work smoothly and accurately. Whilst I found it much easier to control games with traditional buttons and sticks control schemes, it was quicker to hop through menus by switching to the touch screen and tapping through the options. I didn’t get chance to use the main camera on the rear of the device, but the front facing camera that scarily took a picture of my grimacing face to gloat opposition players with before each round of WipEout was functional, if not great, probably on a par with the iPhone 4′s front camera, nowhere near the quality of the main camera of the average smartphone, but notably better in quality than the camera on 3DS.
I didn’t get to see every feature on Vita’s staggeringly long checklist of technological trickery, but what I did see made a few things quite clear; Sony isn’t yet ready to roll over and accept that traditional handheld gaming is dead. This is a technological masterpiece crammed into a very small package, and with a strong software catalogue deserves to succeed. PSP tried to be all things to all people and ended up being a jack of all trades and a master of none. It would be easy to question the wisdom of Sony creating another jack of all trades, but this time it seems to have mastered them all.
