Ps vita buyer guide

2. Presenting Vita’s home screen, It’s all floaty circular icons, with a nice 3D wave animation
in the background, similar to the PS3. On the side of the screen you can see three dots,
representing three pages of icons (if you’ve spent any time with an iOS device, you know
the drill). Up top there’s a 3G signal bar, a clock and a battery monitor. The icon in the
middle reminds you that you’re on the home screen – when you have more applications
open, these will also display next to the home icon, and a quick swipe left and right flicks
between open apps. The top-right corner plays host to a notification counter, including
received messages, party invitations or friend requests.

3. Clicking any icon on the home screen will take you into the LiveArea for that game or app –
here we’re looking at the WipEout 2048 LiveArea, there’s also of a screen of Uncharted:
Golden Abyss’ and the PlayStation Store’s in the gallery. As you can see, this is more than
just a ‘are you sure you want to launch that game?’ dialog, instead presenting quick
shortcuts to the leaderboards, your player profile, something called the “AG Museum”
(presumably a supporting app), and a link to the PlayStation Store to grab DLC (the Fury
DLC in the picture is actually for WipEout HD on PS3, and so is likely a placeholder).
Uncharted’s LiveArea shows various stats both from your own game progress, and the
online community, with a link to the Black Market trading part of that game. The
PlayStation Store’s LiveArea just shows featured content at this time.

4. On LiveArea, there are also three quick links at the top of the panel. The first is to the
game’s digital manual – remember, all Vita games will be available on the Store, with only
some of those at retail in card form – the second is an internet search for the game, and
the third icon isn’t quite clear. It could either manually refresh the LiveArea, or enable you
to update the game/app without having to actually launch the game – if you can queue
these, that’d be a very useful feature.

5. Speaking of the PlayStation Store, here it is a tab to
switch between the game and video stores along
the top – looks like the comic store won’t be
returning for Vita’s launch – and a search function.
Further down, it looks like Sony has taken more
than a little inspiration from Apple’s iOS stores:
there are three featured ads, and then a view that
can flick between the latest releases, the best
sellers, and ‘All Games’.
The product pages themselves are much the same,
with artwork and product details. The rating system
from the existing Store has also made it over.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Sony are making
any kind of preview option compulsory on Vita
games, whether it be a trailer or even a set of
screenshots like you get on most mobile platforms,
at least it’s not in this build of the software. It’s
worth mentioning the little button with three dots
in the bottom-right of the screen; that’s the options
button, and shows up throughout the Vita UI.

6. Your existing PlayStation Network Group chats can be either text- or
account will transfer straight over to voice-based, and messages can also
your Vita. Straight from the profile contain attachments – in this
page, you can see what your friend is conversation, the first message is an
playing and join them, or view their invite to a LBP level, with the second
recent activity, whether that’s trophy reply containing a screenshot. As you
unlocks or in-game progress. You can can see in the top-right, you can
also go right into a chat. manually refresh conversations should
you go out of WiFi or 3G range.

7. With the PSN, must come trophies. Here you can see the trophy list, with a tab on the top-
left corner to view all trophies or only those unlocked on Vita. Even if you choose to view
all trophies, you can see that games are labelled with which platform they are for – it’s not
yet clear how this will work for games where progress can be transferred from PS3 to Vita
and vice versa, like Ruin. What’s also not yet clear is if Vita games will have platinum
trophies; it seems likely that it would work the same way as on PS3, with only the larger
titles having the holy grail trophy.

8. Sony has show off Vita’s media capabilities, you can view photos taken with the camera
application (using either the front or back cameras), as well as JPEGs, GIFs, BMPs, PNGs,
and TIFF images. The music app is capable of playing MP3’s, unprotected ACC files and
WAVs, with MPEG-4 (high, main, baseline and simple profile) videos also compatible.
Interestingly, there’s no sign of the WMA and WMV support in the PS3 and PSP – whether
that’s because it has yet to be implemented, won’t be present, or will be added later in a
firmware update is unknown. We also don’t yet know how to get media actually onto Vita,
presumably through Media Go or some future replacement application, although there is a
‘Content Manager’ app on Vita itself for on-device management.

9. Party is effectively an upgraded group chat Near is the halfway point between Vita’s GPS
application. You can set up any number of support and games, allowing you to unlock
‘rooms’ and flick between them, in which content for games by navigating the real
you can text and voice chat, as well as view world environment. Near also shows you
who’s playing what, or jump into multiplayer where your friends are, as well as what
games together. The best bit? Party runs in other Vita users in the vicinity are playing,
the background at the same time as games, should you fancy a tube carriage WipEout
so we finally have real in-game voice chat. faceoff. Note: the GPS chip is only present in
Party rooms can also be favourited, and the 3G version of Vita
appear to exist even when empty, ready to
be jumped into next time players log online.

10. Sony announced that Vita will also play host
to non-gaming apps, and Facebook, Twitter,
Foursquare and Skype will be the first of
these (it’s not clear whether these will be
available at launch or just after). There
doesn’t appear to be any Vita specific
functionality except the touch-centric UI, but
it’s good to see Sony pushing the non-
gaming capabilities of the console.

11. There are going to be two versions of the Playstation Vita
released. One with just Wi-Fi and a more expensive version
with 3G ($249 for the WiFi only version and $299 for the Wi-
Fi/3G version).
Online retailer Amazon.com has seemingly outed the Sony
PS Vita release date and price, making the portable games
console available for pre-order ahead on February 22, 2012.
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