PlayStation Vita
June 7th, 2011, 2:18am by Jake
With all the Apple cross talk today, the gaming news was lost in the din. I don’t follow the market much, but specs look fine per Engadget. It also reminded me of the PSP launch nearly 7 years ago, which seemed so promising at the time. In hindsight, it’s clear that Sony missed an opportunity to develop a symbiotic ecosystem with the PSP by instead choosing to rigidly control what could be easily done on the device. Certainly, it had a fair chance to be the iPod Touch of its day and perhaps outsold the DS. Now, no matter how compelling, it seems destined to be forever a major player in a niche market, losing sales to the Android devices and iPhones in the pockets of 20% of all Americans. Here’s what Pyslent thought closer to launch.
June 7th, 2011 at 2:22 am
When I play Pacman or Tetris using a touchscreen joystick, I can’t help but think that there’s a better way. Not sure that this is it, though.
June 7th, 2011 at 2:49 am
Searching for old PSP posts, came across this classic posted at the MacWorld iPhone launch, http://www.pyslent.com/?p=1176
June 7th, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Jake, that thread is awesome! Especially when you read through the comments. Some choice bits:
Jake: Thought that it looked difficult to text while driving (a jab at Kelvin). Got the plan pricing right, and wished for the not-yet-announced iPod touch, which he thought would be priced at $600 for an 8GB model.
Kelvin: After waking up late, tried to work out a scam to save $1500 on a car, then got into the iPhone discussion, lamenting the lack of 3G (came one year later) and a front-facing camera (three years later!). Also, Kelvin correctly identified the patent that expanded the touch-sensitive area of the iPhone keyboard, but didn’t get that it was based on predictive text (i.e., guessing what letter was coming next).
Lance: Thought the orientation sensor was awesome, thrilled by the proximity sensor, foreshadowed VoIP use (only a couple years away).
Mike: After expecting an “underwhelming” phone announcement, I was pretty down on the idea of a keyboard-less phone, skeptical of the battery life claims, and not happy about paying $80 for a cell phone plan when I had unlimited EDGE for $50, thank you very much.
Wow, how times have changed!
June 7th, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Heh, Josh Topolsky mentioned recently on his This Is My Next podcast that he thought it would be cool if the part of the screen under your finger magnified on approach, and I remembered that I had pined for the same thing in the past! I like the way that guy thinks. I also always like the intro/outro music on their podcast (this week, it was a MIDI version of OMD’s Enola Gay, which happens to sound the same as the normal, non-MIDI, version of the song).
June 17th, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Apropos of nothing (well, other than we linked to the original iPhone discussion here), our original iPhone 4 discussion is worth another skim, http://www.pyslent.com/?p=1894