Sony PlayStation Vita review - The Verge

Look, Feel, and Usability

The Vita dispenses with the PSP and PS3's XMB interface in favor of a new, smartphone-inspired OS. Sony loses major points for style here, with an incredibly cluttered visual appearance and some cheesy muzak backing your every move (you can turn this off, thankfully), but for the most part it’s provided a straightforward, efficient interface. The home screen works along the lines of Android or iOS, with app icons held in rearrangable bubbles across multiple pages. Holding down on an icon for a second will let you view its information including size, parental control and the date it was added, and you also have the option to delete it directly from the home screen. Inserting a retail PS Vita game card adds an app to the home screen that stays there until you manually delete it, so you have a quick link to trophy information, the digital manual, DLC and so on. You can’t delete any of the preloaded apps, and redownloading or reinserting a game will always add its app to the home screen. Tapping on an app icon will bring you to its LiveArea screen.

Each app has its own LiveArea, which can be as simple as a single start button or a lot more elaborate. Hot Shots Golf’s LiveArea, for example, includes direct links to the game’s website, multiplayer features within the game itself, and the PSN store for downloadable content. You can have up to six open at a time, though there currently are some restrictions — you'll have to quit your game if you want to switch to the web browser, for example. (Sony says it wants to add the ability to browse the web while playing a game via a firmware update, however.) Swipe through the LiveAreas to see what's been running recently on your Vita, tap the Start button in the center to reopen one, and close any of them by sliding your finger from the top right of the screen to the bottom left, like tearing a page off a calendar. This gesture is also used to unlock the Vita upon waking it from sleep — at first I thought that using the same gesture to close apps and start using the system was a little incongruous, but you come to think of it as "discarding" the lock screen.

In fact, the entire OS is touch-controlled, with the hardware buttons having almost no role to play whatsoever. This is mostly fine, as the UI is designed around touch, but it feels restrictive at times — there’s no scrolling around webpages with the analog stick, for example, and no using the shoulder buttons to skip songs in the music player. Unlike the DS’s interface (which relies on a resistive screen) you won’t get very far in this OS with gloves on, though the screen does respond fine to input from a capacitive stylus.

Text entry is handled by a software keyboard, and while the keys are accurate the size of the screen can make rapid typing difficult, as you’ll need to stretch your thumbs a bit to reach keys in the middle. Despite almost never using autocomplete on any other device, I usually found myself resorting to it when using the Vita to type words containing the letters "G" and "V". I’m not crazy about the numpad-style number input, either, with all the keys bunched together on the right-hand side of the screen — since bringing it up requires a tap on the left side of the keyboard, it’s difficult to activate and use in a single motion. I would have preferred a more standardized numeral row along the top.

The corners of the screen are usually reserved for standardized actions. The lower left corner, for example, pops up with a Back button at appropriate times, like when using the browser or going a couple of levels deep into menus. The bottom right corner displays ellipsis when there are further options available than what’s currently displayed on screen — this is how you access your download list or redeem a code in the PlayStation Store, for example, as these functions have no discrete buttons in the main view. The upper right corner of the screen has a notification counter, and touching it brings up a pop-over list with friend requests, trophies and various other updates.

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