The Vita arrives in a piano black guise and that glossy finish is pretty hungry for your fingerprints. It's likely to pick up more than its fair share with the double touchscreen setup found here. In our hands, the Vita feels pretty similar to the original launch PSP, although it's impressively light for all the high-end internals. The 3G / WiFi model weights in at 279g (9.8 ounces), matching the first generation Sony handheld, although it remains heavier than the 3000 series, which scraped underneath 190g (6.7 ounces). The 3DS is also slightly lighter, although due to its clam-shell composition, it's a little thicker when in transit. Your eyes will be immediately drawn to the broad 5-inch OLED capacitive touchscreen. The apparently Samsung-manufactured screen makes the most of its 960 x 544 resolution and the OLED technology makes for superb viewing angles, although we'd have appreciated a bit more brightness here for outdoor play. Videos downloaded from the PlayStation Store are optimized for the Vita's not-so common resolution and are sharp and vivid. Games also sparkle, with an occasional frame-rate wobble that we're (optimistically) hoping disappears when developers get to grips with the new hardware.
The touchscreen is paired with another narrower patterned touch panel across the back. We, however, didn't just come here for touchscreen gaming -- let's take a look at the controls. You'll find them evenly distributed on either side of the screen. On the left side you'll find a d-pad slightly smaller than the one found on both its predecessor and the DualShock controller. Underneath it resides the primary analog stick, which is suitably 'sticky 'enough for play, although it seems to give a little easier than the sticks on the PSP and the PS3 controller.
Finally, a PlayStation button anchors you to the UI's home screen whenever it's pressed. Press it in tandem with the start button and you can take a screen grab in both the UI and (some) games. Like the PlayStation button, both the start and select buttons lie flush with the screen, this time joining Sony's trademark button medley and the (increasingly necessary) second analog stick on the right side. The pair of shoulder buttons round out the controls and, like we mentioned in our first hands-on, seem a tad livelier than those found on the PSP. Sound like enough control options? Well, don't forget that there's also the same Sixaxis motion controls found in the PS3 controllers.
Touring the rest of the hardware, there are two slots along the top edge of the Vita, both protected with silvery plastic covers. While the Vita-labeled cover on the left takes the new proprietary game cards, the one on the right has been revealed as the anonymous-sounding "accessory port." [Thanks, Rodney]
Next to the covers, you'll find a design nod to the PSP Go, with some reassuringly sturdy volume controls and the power button. Standby mode is a brief button press away, while you'll need to depress for three seconds for a full shutdown.
A cover on the left edge accepts the SIM card for 3G connectivity, with Sony's new game memory storage slot located at the base.The proprietary connection for power is also here and around the back, the aforementioned capacitive touchpad is flanked by two grip pads to rest the device comfortably in your hands. They'll also raise the Vita slightly off the surface, sidestepping the chances of scuffing the symbol patterned touchpad. The placement here seems better located for petite hands, as we found our fingers typically placed themselves closer to the center. A metallic plastic strip that runs around the circumference of the device extends into two strap loops at the bottom of each corner.
Inside, it's another quad-core beast, an ARM Cortex A9 with an additional SGX54MP4+ GPU AND 512MB of memory and an additional 128MBs of VRAM. When it comes to raw specs, it simply dwarfs the PSP. In fact, it also has double the RAM of the PS3, although that guy strikes back with more dedicated VRAM (256MB versus 128MB for the Vita). Unfortunately, while we expected the built-in apps to jump into action this generally wasn't the case -- the browser, in particular, puts on an especially poor performance. Games, which are understandably quite complex, often take their time to load up, but when they do, they offer us a very visible jump on the scale and detail of what we've come to expect from portable gaming. Sound quality is also suitably crisp, with rich noises projecting out from the two stereo speakers.
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