As of February 8th 2012, all “PlayStation®Network accounts (PSN) will be renamed to “Sony Entertainment Network accounts” or (SEN accounts). This effect will take place before the launch date of the new Sony PS Vita on February 22nd 2012 and will be a system software update on the PS3™ or the PS Vita, thus you will see the following change take place: “PlayStation®Network accounts” will be renamed to “Sony Entertainment Network accounts”.
This update will only change the name of the account, neither username nor passwords will be affected in any way.
For questions, more information relavant to this change, visit the official playstation support website: http://eu.playstation.com/support
The PlayStation Vita looks quite similar to the PSP, however without any doubt the Vita is more impressive and elegantly designed. It sports a 5-inch OLED multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, 24-bit color with a resolution of 960 × 540 qHD and has pixel density of 220 ppi. The console has a huge size that measures 182 x 84 x 19 mm in size. To give you a fair idea on how huge it is, consider placing an iPhone 4, which will perfectly fit in the space where the display of the PS Vita is. Doesn’t that sound enormous?
Having said that, the PlayStation Vita fits comfortably in your hands and with the round edges it makes it easier to play games on it.
Controls
In the earlier version of the PlayStation, there was just a single analog stick, but in the PS Vita you can find two analog sticks on its front, joined by a D-pad along with the standard PS button. On the top, it has the Left and Right shoulder triggers along with the Start and Select standard buttons.
It has two touch-sensitive pads behind the device where you rest your fingers for support. It is quite similar to the track pad on your laptop and it is designed to function in a similar fashion. These pads work in combination with the controls of the PlayStation Vita which can be used to stroke and poke for additional controls when playing the game. The popularity of this new control all depends on how the game developers make use of it for the PS Vita.
Other features include…
- Chatting – The PlayStation Vita supports chatting with your friends while you’re watching a video or playing a multi-player game, in a way to keep you connected.
- Unlike PSP, the PSV will not support video output or contain a removable battery.
- Hardware wise, the device features a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MP Core processor (3 of the 4 cores will be usable for applications) and a quad-core SGX543MP4 + GPU. It will have a 512 MB of system RAM and 128 MB of VRAM.
- It was confirmed by Sony that the battery would last for about 3-5 hours of gameplay, 5 hours of video, and up to 9 hours of music listening with the screen off.
- The PS Vita will have a storage media card slot, where users can plug in NVG cards of capacities ranging from 4 GB to 32 GB.
- Note: NGV is a new proprietary flash card format similar to the Nintendo 3DS Game Cards.
- It also sports a Six-axis system – 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope – enabling the PS Vita for sensing motion. Along with that, it has another 3-axis compass with integrated GPS and connectivity options such as 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.
- The PlayStation Vita has both front and rear cameras with supporting features such as face detection, head detection and head tracking that can be used for personalization and customization.
- The device will also support backwards compatible PlayStation Portable downloadable titles, PlayStation minis, PlayStation Suite games, PSOne Classics, videos, and comics from the PlayStation Store.
PlayStation Vita Technical Specifications
CPUARM: Cortex – A9 core (4 core)
GPUS: GX543MP4+
External Dimensions: Approx. 182.0 x 18.6 x 83.5mm (width x height x depth)
Screen: (Touch Screen) 5 inches (16:9), 960 x 544, Approx. 16 million colors, OLED multi touch screen (capacitive type)
Rear Touch Pad: Multi touch pad (capacitive type)
Cameras: front camera and rear camera
Sound: Built-in stereo speakers and built-in microphone
