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The future’s looking bright

The PSP Vita features a big, bright screen that’s dead set on trying to redefine what you think of portable gaming as Sony promises brilliant visuals courtesy of the system’s 960 x 544 OLED screen (richer, more accurate graphics to the tune of 16 million colors!) and 5 inches of real-estate. Judging by the screen size alone, there’s no question that the device is indeed aiming for a top-of-the-line mobile multimedia experience, and possibly, vying for top position as the best flashlight alternative ever.

Touch it all over

It’s no surprise that the Vita’s screen is touch-enabled. Hey, as the iPhone has proven, touch-enabled games could be a lot of fun, so Sony’s just being smart to include such a feature. They didn’t stop there however, as they also put a touch pad on the back…just because they can. Is it a gimmick? We won’t know until a game really makes effective use of it, but isn’t it at least comforting to know that you’ve got more places to put a finger on, now? If that’s too novel, then worry not as the standard cross-triangle-circle-square Playstation configuration is onboard as well.

Put your geek hats on

Time now for a little number crunching. First, a look at the original PSP’s specs: a 333 MHz CPU, and 32 MB of RAM. Now, a glance at what’s under the hood of Sony’s fancy, new doohickey: a quad-core, ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU, another quad-core GPU, plus 512 MB of RAM and 128 MB of RAM. Not bad, right? We were going to bring out schematics and diagrams to explain how powerful it really is but we’re still stuck trying to pronounce ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore properly.

In-game screenshot taken from Super Stardust Delta.

But wait, there’s more!

Aside from the touch-screen features, the Vita also implements Sony’s Sixaxis motion control system, which, if forgotten memories of early PS3 games serve us right, will have us waving and tilting the Vita side-to-side to control a game. What we can only hope for is that the implementation this time around is tighter and well, more fun. The Vita also has two cameras: one on the front and another at the back. Most importantly though, the Vita has Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity (Globe currently has the rights to it), which we wish will be put to effective use in terms of multiplayer gaming.