Vita review

On paper, it’s incoherent: a bewildering congregation of inputs and delivery methods that should struggle to come together with any grace. Look at the specifications: Sony’s new handheld has game cards, memory cards and a digital store. It has two touchpads, thumbsticks, a gyroscope, an accelerometer, a microphone and cameras.

The biggest surprise about Vita is how natural all of this feels when it’s resting in your hands, and how harmoniously its weird array of features slot into place. Sony’s skill at designing luxurious, aspirational products has resulted in an elegant slice of hard plastic that’s equally at home mimicking glass or brushed metal, while early titles such as Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Gravity Rush use touchscreen, motion and button inputs with ease. Elsewhere, the LiveArea UI draws your game collection together into a friendly cluster of shimmering bubbles. Vita hasn’t been launched into particularly calm waters – and, with no Monster Hunter to back it up, its early Japanese sales figures hardly inspire confidence – but it makes an assured first impression all the same.

For starters, the hardware feels plush and reliable, with only the rubbery hinges of the card slots hinting that one eye was on budget during development. Vita is slightly larger than PSP, but it fits your hands much more comfortably. And with no UMD drive chattering away inside, it feels less fragile, too. Once again, the screen is king. Vita’s five-inch OLED display is bright, sharp, and free from the afterimages that plagued so many PSP games. While it’s not quite Retina display resolution, it also has four times as many pixels as its older sibling.

In fact, Vita has clearly learned much from its predecessor. It has two thumbsticks rather than a single analogue nub, PSP’s flimsy power slider is gone in favour of a metallic stud, and the battery is no longer removable – a change in policy that’s annoying for consumers, but may circumvent many of PSP’s problems with hacking. Crucially, there’s a sense that Sony’s learned from PSP’s hubris, too. There’s no talk of this being the Walkman of the 21st century – despite the close involvement of Walkman designer Tokashi Sogabe – and the Vita cards housing its games aren’t billed as a revolution in multimedia storage. PSP’s big gamble was trying to do a bit of everything. Vita’s a roundly capable device, but it’s clearly putting games back at the centre of the experience. In 2012, such a purity of purpose feels refreshingly bold.

That’s not to say Sony hasn’t been keeping track of smartphone trends. Vita’s screen offers multitouch control that feels every bit as responsive as an iPhone’s, even if the surface texture creates a bit more friction under your finger and seems to hold greasy smudges a little longer. LiveArea, meanwhile, borrows its springy, playful physics from iOS and displays apps (they’re not called games any more) as a series of plasticky bubbles. LiveArea is built around touch, too, with vertical strokes moving you through pages of apps, and a swipe to the right – or a press of the PlayStation button – bringing up all the software that’s currently running. You can then either leap into that software with a jab, or peel it from the screen to deactivate it, a process that soon becomes second nature. Like an iPhone, Vita also saves in-game progress the moment you close an app or put the device to sleep, and it’s surprisingly quick to restart.

Vita’s onboard software ranges from the genuinely useful to the pleasantly experimental. Alongside audio and video players, you’ll find a content manager for the transfer of files between your Vita and a PS3 or a PC, plus Near, a location-based social network that keeps track of your activities and any other Vitas you might come across. Multitasking capabilities mean that you can have friends lists, messaging, and cross-title chat running in the background while you dive into a game, and the only real disappointment comes in the form of the Web browser, which is slow to start, awkward to use and apparently incapable of resizing columns of text when you zoom in.

The UI may have been influenced by the current generation of smartphones, but when it comes to gaming Vita is capable of the kind of feats that Apple and Android users can only dream of. It’s not a question of power, even though the console’s quad-core processor can deliver graphics that come close to matching the kind of visuals you’ll see on a PS3 – albeit with less elaborate effects, and fewer onscreen elements. Character models are detailed, environments are roomy and complex, but there’s still relatively little an iPad 2 couldn’t rival. It’s the wide array of inputs that distinguishes Vita from the pack.