PS Vita Community Q&A: You ask questions and we try to answer them, for Science!

[Thez]

Hey guys!

Steven and myself were recently given the extreme pleasure of spending a few hours with the PS Vita and some of its games.

Of course, you may have questions and wonderings that we may have never considered. We are, after all, only chimps at typewriters.

Post your postulations in this thread, and we will do our best to answer as many as we can in a published article.

[The Black Wolf]

I have some questions.

1. Is it comfortable to hold?

2. I hear the back of the PS Vita is used for touch controls. How comfortable is that? Does it feel awkward?

[BoyBettaKnow]

What is the sound quality on the unit like, is it good enough to listen to music though? What is the quality on the screen, does it have a high gamut?

[Thez]

Ok, I'm going to close the thread up guys. Not much of a response, so I will answer these here:

Question 1: Is it Comfortable to Hold

In short, yes. It's surprisingly light, which I believe is due to a mixture of lightweight materials, lack of disk drive, and no motors for vibration. The indents on the back of the device are well places to rest onto your curled fingers, displacing the weight a bit more around them as well. The texture of the material between this and touch pad is noticeable - rubber to glasslike, so you always know roughly where your fingers are. Placement of face buttons, shoulder buttons, and the sticks seem great. Don't believe any of that "omg the sticks are too close to the buttons!" nonsense you may have heard. Only issues I have are with accessing non-game buttons, which of course doesn't hamper your gameplay experience. I'd prefer not to have to shift my grip, but it's not hampering any of the games.

Question 2: Back touch pad. Comfortable? Awkward?

I genuinely have had no issue using the back touch pad, other than no practice and experience. A lot of the games I've played that used it didn't require Fruit Ninja levels of dexterity, keeping things simple and granting a reasonable amount of leeway. As mentioned above, thanks to the indentations/grips on the back of the system, the change in texture is noticeable. This makes the boundaries obvious, and helps to avoid accidental touchy feely.

Question 3: Is the audio quality good enough for music?

How do you define good enough? I find that a really tricky question, as someone might plug in some godawful iPod earbuds and say "sure", while an audiophile with $300 headphones might scream in agony. We've had a go with them under bad conditions (read: noisy rooms full of loud mouthed British journos), but for what it's worth with the nice headphones they've supplied, the audio quality has sounded fine. I don't know if it plays any lossless codecs though, I don't think the PSP or the PS3 could though so don't hold your breath.

Question 4: Screen Quality, does it have a high gamut?

Again, sub-optimal conditions. Screen looks gorgeous, colours are vibrant. Looks a lot better in motion than it does standing still. I believe the same screen is on my HTC Sensation, albeit smaller, and it's fantastic. Sorry I can't be much more helpful here, again that's also a very subjective thing affected by any of a million variables.

Thanks for asking the questions guys! The responses seem a little long, so maybe I'll think of putting it as a post.

Stay Tuned.