Review-Sony Playstation Vita (PS Vita): The Best in Handheld Gaming?

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Pladidus Santoso

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Features News

January 18, 2012

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Playstation Store: Maximizing PS Vita’s Potentials

ps vita ps store 1 — PS Vita has its own dedicated section at PS Store, making it easy to search for appropriate applications

ps vita ps store 2 — Before buying the full version of a game, you can try the demo first, just like the old times

Walking into a store to buy a game has become a thing of the past. You can download the hottest titles for your PS Vita from the Playstation Store, where a special section containing PS Vita applications can be found. Here, you can buy games or try it the demos first, should you fancy.

Live Tweet: Integrating the Social Network Functionality into PS Vita

ps vita live tweet 1 — PS Vita has a rather sweet-looking Twitter app

To keep up with current trends, Sony has also integrated popular social networking services on this portable gaming console. The company plans on providing instant access to these services, which include Facebook, Twitter, and Skype. For the mean time, though, only Twitter is readily available via the Live Tweet application. The program is simple and easy to use, allowing you to have full access to your Twitter account. With it, you can check your timeline, and retweet or reply messages with ease and in real time.

Trophy: Time to Show What You Can Do!

ps vita thophy — With the trophy feature, you can show off your gaming skills

ps vita thophy 1 — Check for uncompleted "missions" and make achievements

With the Trophy, PS Vita adopts Playstation 3’s “achievements” system. By meeting certain requirements in games, you will be entitled to a trophy that serves as proof of your remarkable achievements. The Trophy is connected to PSN server, which will display your trophy collection and rank your level based on the percentage of trophies you’ve obtained. Not only that, you can also compare your achievement with that of your friends’ in Party.

Music and Video Capabilities: Unremarkably Ordinary

ps vita music — There’s nothing special about PS Vita’s music and video capabilities

Music and video capabilities are the other must haves in today’s mobile devices. While PS Vita might be able to deliver exceptional gaming experience, it’s a bit lacking in this regard. Its music player only supports MP3, MP4, and WAV files. Video wise, PS Vita is restricted by its own, unique screen resolution. During our test, this console refused to play certain video files because it could not handle their (high) resolution. How about video format support? Sadly enough, it’s limited to MP4 files, and only at certain resolutions.

Remote Play: Close Communications with Playstation 3

ps vita remote play 1 — Can we play PS3 games on the PS Vita? Nope, it doesn’t stretch that far, unfortunately...

One popular rumor suggested that PS Vita would be able to directly run Playstation 3 games, just like what Nintendo does with its Nintendo Wii-U and the host console’s display. In reality, it just doesn’t work that way, yet. Synchronization with a Playstation 3 console through the Remote Play application allows PS Vita to transfer apps, saved games data, and contents from it to the Playstation 3 and vice versa, but that’s about it. This does, however, give additional role to the Playstation 3 as backup device. Due to the required firmware update, we don’t recommend attempting synchronization if you jailbreak/ CFW your Playstation 3.

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