Joely Talks About Gadgets

Joel's Electronics review: The PSV

For my birthday, my family and I purchased a gift of a Play Station Vita, for me as a gift, in celebration. Also known as a PSV, it is the latest of sony's modestly successful Play-Station-Portable line of gaming consoles. It competes is this area agains modern smart mobile phones, many if not all support simple flash-style games that provide moderate amusement at a low cost for the casual gamer-on-the-go. But for those who want a more in-depth gaming experience while perambulating around, many choose the Nintendo DS, the PSP and some hi-power tablets that have a similar experience.

The PSV boasts a quite frankly beautiful five inch multi-touchscreen, dual button/analog controls, rear touchpad, front and rear facing cameras (You'll barely use the cameras), accelerometer + gyroscope sensors that along with a a powerful graphics and CPU make for a very immersive and versatile console. Sony claimed that PS3 level games could be played on the PSV, this simply isn't true, nonetheless the games are incredible. Apple can quibble all it wants about infinity blade II and the New iPad's orgasmic screen resolution, but it cannot compete with the PSV's frankly crazy-fun console happy-times that make your head spin and your eyes pop. Design wise, you can tell how much has been blatantly copied from the iPhone (Metal band antenna, the OS, and the capacitive touch screen), but that surely doesn't make those choices any less slick and delicious.

One can either purchase hard copies of games in store for the device, or (And this was especially appealing to me) buy them online and download directly to the device, as well as songs pictures and movies that can be pulled across from your PC/Mac computer. But if you want to do the latter, you'll have to fork over to sony up to one hundred extra dollars for a custom "Sony" memory card, as the animal has zip onboard storage space for your games and any media you want to have fun with. Regular SD memory cards will not work with it, which is a huge pain in the neck, and as many games can be whole gigabytes in size, you'll want plenty of memory space. Sony claims that this is to help to defend against piracy, but I am dubious, considering that is comes with no mem card of any size.

The greatest flaw this device has is limited and expensive game titles. Compared to the huge number of Apps available at the android or apple app stores for smartphones, and the well established Nintendo database of games, the Vita's selection is sadly limited, which was a similar problem that sony has had with the PS3 vs Xbox 360 Shenanigans (Why do you not learn sony?). A game on the device will cost anything from eleven to seventy dollars, add that to the fact that the games on the iphone/iPod Touch and Android (while by no means in league with the Vita's) are cheap as chips, and the easy-as-pie-to-pirate nintendo DS games are what it has for competition, and you have a very unhappy consumer.

The Ultra-Rich's console of choice, this is truly a luxury item. And unless Sony takes it's head out of it's ass and realises that, I predict that it will sell poorly. It's a gorgeous and stunning piece of engineering. But not for the everyman by any account. And if you do buy one, for god's sake, check on eBay like I didn't.
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