Notice the small hole for the speaker on PSP, and how much gunk the PSP’s slide pad has gathered through all these years. Vita’s memory card slot has cleaner design too, but these two are the prominent ones on the systems. The pieces are very small and don’t come to mind too often, but details tend to mount fast over the larger strokes. The Vita remedied this problem by having all the pieces uniform in colour and having much more stylised look to them. Of course, the idea is that you don’t see behind it but once or twice. The outward appearance is decent and follows the overall curves of the console, but feel and back of the piece lack any sort of refinement. The memory card slot is protected by a piece of hard plastic that is connected by soft plastic. That is not the only piece that feels cheap with PSP. You could just snap it off just like that The drive itself has a neat design, but it feels so damn flimsy. It’s weird to see a handheld that aims to be rather mature in design only have relatively immature looking disc format. Their appearance is also rather toyetic, unlike the MiniDisc that still looks good to this day. The discs are relatively well protected, much like the drive they’re inserted, they feel flimsy. The UMD format neat in of itself, but SONY should’ve used MiniDisc rather than invent a new format. It does not only look untrusty, but feels like that too. When opening the drive door, you notice that the door is very thin plastic and the metal parts are equally as flimsy. With PSP the very first thing is the UMD drive. However, there are few places on both PSP and Vita where this aim for higher worth is betrayed. PSP has that glossy black all over, though I admit I personally do feel PSP’s plastic feels a bit cheap Note that Vita’s backside has matte plastic where there is no touch function, separating it. I also have a guard on the touchpad on Vita’s back. Mine is working, though I’ve had to tweak it few times. Silver in PSP goes around the console and that neat ring in the back, showcasing the spot where the UMD will be spinning, or as it often seems to be, not spinning because the drive is broken. They make it rather well too, especially with overall glossy colouring and selected areas of silver with PSP, and overall uniform heft with Vita. This is to differentiate the portable PlayStation line from its competitors and make a statement of worth. Perhaps most importantly, they feel expensive. One thing SONY always seems to emphasize with their consoles is that they feel nicely build. Sadly, a bubble slipped under Vita’s guard, and I’m too cheap to change it They may feel and look nice at first, but both of them attract high amounts of greasy fingerprints and scratches. I’m using a pair of PS3 controller as stands for this review. I would’ve wanted to review the first versions, but I don’t have access to them. Both are second versions of their respective console series, so the comparison point is either little off or spot on depending how you want to view it. The versions that I will use in this review are PSP-2004 and PCH-2016. The reason to this is that neither console saw any truly different iterations in their lifetime (outside Go), and as such the two allow a good point of comparisons how SONY moved from PSP to Vita. If I ever get my hands on it, I’ll review its design as well. Unlike with the 3Ds review, I will review PSP and PS Vita with each, and as I don’t have an access to Go, it’ll have to be a separate curiosity. The underlying sliding mechanics of Go allowed SONY to cram PSP into a far smaller size, thou I have heard some contradictory reports on the quality of the buttons. PlayStation Portable Go is an exception to the rule, which shows that you can have vertical design. This is mainly due to the screen that governs the face of the consoles. SONY’s handheld console line has been mainly using horizontal approach. These two just work, there isn’t really any other way you put the screen without making the playing awkward in a way or another. The reason why I wanted to start with a chart like was to illustrate the design that across the ages game consoles have followed very similar design ideas, and the reason why this has happened is because there’s pretty much exactly two methods how to make a handheld console to work vertical and horizontal. Looking for a comprehensive history chart of handheld consoles turned out to be a useless exercise.
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