So it was a nice surprise when I walked into a Game store in Reading yesterday evening, while I had some time to kill, to find that they had a Demo version of the PSP Vita. Even better was that the shop was practically deserted, meaning that I could get some hands on time with the monster.

The above photo shoes the PSP in the Hand – its a pretty big machine. At almost 2cm thick, you know it’s there, but once you adjust to the chunky feel, it almost becomes an extension of your arm. And it is light. While you can feel the Vita with your hands, the weight barely registers, meaning you don’t tire of it quickly.

The 5″ (127mm),m 16:9 capacitive, multi-touch screen has a resolution of 960×544 which struck me a surprising low given the 960×640 resolution of the significantly smaller iPhone 4, yet it looked rather good. Supporting 16 million colours, the clarity of the screen was better than that of the PSP S&L or the PSP Go, both of which I have owned in the past. Additionally, the backlight was strong and you don’t have to strain your eyes to see what’s going on. Finally, the sensitivity of the screen was spot on, allowing for smooth navigation of the menu systems both on the Vita homescreen and in game as well.

While we are on the subject of software – this PSP was running version 1.52 showing that the old PSP software has been ditched in favour of a whole new interface built around touch. That being said the menu system seemed to have no real structure – unlike the old PSP software which seperated your media into categories, the Vita seemed to randomly place its icons, mixing Games into Videos, Pictures and Music.

The dual analogs are a welcome addition to the front of the Vita, allowing for more interactive play in games like Uncharted which utilises one for the character movement and another for the camera – much like many of the current console RPG’s on the market.

The back Touch Panel allows for an added degree of interaction in games – although there wasn’t much on the demo model that supported it. The only game available on the device with back panel integration was Uncharted 3 where it was used for some actions like climbing ladders, traversing walls etc, however it really felt like this was a last minute addition to the game- some of the demos seen when the Vita was first announced showed some really interactive gameplay where the back panel almost became another dimension in itself but this wasn’t reproduced well in Uncharted.

Getting down to the bare circuits so to speak, the Vita has a quad core ARM Cortex A9 at its core, giving the software a really smooth feeling. App’s open quickly (although games can take a very long time to load) and you can swap between them instantaneously, while closing an app or game completely is as easy as a swipe of the finger. The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is the SGX543MP4+ which might look like a mouthful, but is also Quad-Core – giving the Vita an octo-core platform to base its games on. Hopefully this overhead will make for some really nice multi-threading in future games to bring really great performance.

In-game performance of the PSP was smooth…once the game loaded. Wipeout was fast paced and vivid (although that didn’t make me a better player) and the graphics were clean and crisp. While 6-axis control wasn’t enabled, Wipeout is said to support it, which would be a wlcome addition and work much better on a portable platform that on the console.

Everybody’s Golf, besides having a very Japanese twist (which I liked), has some cool capabilities too, such as using the motion sensor on the Vita for a first person game – you have to physically ‘look’ down the fairway to see where your shot went.

It was hard to tell from the limited time I had with the Vita but it did seem that there is no internal memory, which could explain some of the loading times for games. Personally, I am a little disappointed that a next-gen platform couldnt fit in a bit of flash memory – although no doubt its planned for a later hardware refresh.

Sony has confirmed that the PSP will launch in the UK with a 4, 8 and 16GB memory card available for it, but with no 32GB option some gamers have been more than a little annoyed. The shot below shows the memory card slot on the right, and the USB slot on the left.

In terms of connectivity, there will be two versions of the Vita available, one with just WiFi and one with added 3G (supported in the UK by Vodafone) allowing online play on the move. Additionally, both devices have built-in GPS and WiFi location services which makes the prospect of a maps app very likely.

The Vita is due for worldwide release on the 22nd February for both 3G and WiFi versions. So far 25 titles have been confirmed for US release, with the UK number seemingly a lot lower. The unit will be priced at £229.99 with games retailing at around £35.

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With the release of OSX Lion this week I figured a fresh install (using the recovery partition which is created during the Lion install) might do my iMac good so I set about backing up my drives using Time Machine. My Mac is configured to do this over the network but lo and behold – Lion no longer supports Time Machine backups to non AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) network drives, so my SMB-based NAS (Server Message Block) was absolutely no use to me (not to mention the lost backups…).

But I had a nice shiny new hard drive! The Seagate drive is designed to be used with both Windows and OSX interchangeably and as a result included bundled drivers to allow OSX to mount, read and write to an NTFS partition (for those of you without Seagate drives you might want to check out MacFUSE – Specifically NTFS-3G which allows you to mount NTFS on Mac. Also, it’s free!). The problem is that Time Machine doesn’t like NTFS volumes either, requiring a Mac HFS+ formatted drive. Not a problem though using some ingenious thinking.

Originally, when you wanted to use Time Machine on a network drive you had to create a Time Machine volume (.sparsebundle) and copy it to your networked volume. The same principle apples to NTFS drives.

Start by creating  the appropriate volume for Time Machine. For this we will need both the network name of the Mac and its MAC address. For the name, open a terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and type:

uname -a

The output will include something like:

Darwin Stan-Jewhursts-iMac.local 11.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 11.0.0: Sat Jun 18 12:56:35 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1699.22.73~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

Your machines network name is the phrase preceding .local. For this example its Stan-Jewhursts-iMac. For the MAC address type:

ifconfig en0 | grep ether

Which will return something along the lines of 12:23:34:f5:4e. This is the MAC address of the ethernet port. Finally, create the HFS volume required for Time Machine. The following creates a 400G volume although you can substitute this for the maximum size you want your backup history to be:

hdiutil create -size 400g -fs HFS+J -volname "Time Machine" NETWORK-NAME_MAC-ADDRESS.sparsebundle

Make sure you remove the colons from your MAC address. For our example this would look like Stan-Jewhursts-iMac_122334f54e.sparsebundle. This will take a few seconds to create. When it has completed, copy the volume to your NTFS drive (make sure its mounted and can be written to):

rsync -aE NETWORK-NAME_MAC-ADDRESS.sparsebundle /Volumes/YOUR-EXTERNAL-DRIVE

Again, this will take several seconds to complete. When it does, remove the Volume you created locally:

rm -rf NETWORK-NAME_MAC-ADDRESS.sparsebundle

Finally, fire up Time Machine and browse to your external hard drive. The backup will start in two minutes or you can manually start it using the Time Machine logo located in the top bar (Back Up Now). Sit back and relax while your files are made safe and secure.

So I put my thinking cap on and headed over to Overclockers UK. Now, normally I would order from Scan, but recently I have found that Overclockers have had some excellent bargains to be had. So with that in mind I started to select hardware that he would need.

Any powerful computer (and even laptops) nowadays revolve around a Quad Core processor so I started with an Intel Core i5 2500K – great little chip. No hyper-threading but lots of overclocking headroom. A chip like this needed a good board and a good cooler. As price was a factor in this build I decided to go for the Gigabyte P67A-UD3-B3 and couple it with a Zalman CNPS9900-MAX CPU cooler. With permission, this 3.3GHz chip should be easily pushed to 4GHz with the right amount of tweaking.

So we have a fast processor but we can’t have slow components restricting our data bandwidth in the rest of the build. So I figured some GSkill DDR3 RAM (4x2GB @ 2133MHz!) and an OCZ Vertex SSD (550MB/s Read, 500MB/s Write) should do the trick to keep the data pumping through those copper veins.

And then came the graphics card. So much power is available for so little these days and nothing personifies this more that the nVidia GTX560 Ti which packs a hell of a gaming punch for under £200 — £174 to be precise.

Rounding off the build was a Cooler Master 550W PSU, an LG 23″ monitor (1920×1080), a 1TB Seagate Barracuda and a Samsung BluRay/DVD±RW combi drive. Finally, the excellent NZXT Phantom to put it all in.

Pictures of the hardware and build to come. My price for sorting him out! Hopefully some benchmarks too!

Battery-life: For me this was the big hitter. I currently own a MacBook Pro as my main laptop (2008 Unibody edition to be precise) and while I love it to pieces for great high powered mobile computing, it’s battery life really sucks – were talking 2-3 hours here with wifi on. With wifi off the max I have been able to squeeze out of it (screen at lowest brightness tick etc) has been about 3 1/2 hours, so its not really amazing.

Some high end netbooks offer 7-8 hour battery lives, but this will diminish to about 5 hours on usage of wifi for web surfing and general, everyday usage. The iPad on the other hand boasts as 10hr battery life…and on top of that it actually delivers on that boast and can actually better it! Which is perfect for a day of usage at uni or work.

Portability: Another big reason for my purchase, the iPad is just so easy to carry around. It’s super slim, and weights next to nothing. For example, I am currently sitting in my car, with my chair rolled back and my iPad on my lap (oh yeah, I’m writing this entry on it) and i can barely notice it. I would have a hard time doing this with a netbook and it would be impossible with my MacBook…my car is very small.

Also after carrying a MacBook Pro around for a few weeks you will welcome the relief your shoulders get. However this can lead to the idea that not bringing s bag to work is a good idea. Perhaps, but remember your keys are in there (that’s why I’m in my car…)

Applications: Everything I would use on a netbook, especially in this final year at uni, has a version or something similar if not better on the iPad. At this point I have to become slightly critical as the only office solutions for the iPad are currently paid apps, but I’m holding out for an OpenOffice variant for the iPad. Other than that though there are tons of free apps dinged for the iPad and lots more on the way too.

Coolness: Ok, I’ll admit, the iPad is one neat piece of kit. Ever seen a Star Trek PADD? I’ve wanted one ever since I was a kid…this is kinda realised (in a slightly more real world way) by the iPad. So I guess there was the typical gadget lust to encourage me to buy the iPad over an eeePC.

Sp what are my impressions so far? I’m impressed. Having never owned an apple product that runs an iPhone (or iPhone based) OS I have to say the iPad has bettered all of my expectations. Its super fast and has caused me no grief thus far. And for someone who’s eyesight normally sucks I’m glad to say that my eyes haven’t suffered from the delicious high resolution screen. Yes it’s a bit odd using a 4:3 format when I’m so used to 16:10 but at the same time its refreshing to have something that little bit different.

For just lazing round the house watching movies or youtube videos it really is easy to use. Even my dad could get to grips with it quickly. And photos look amazing on it. The standard 10.1″ screens of netbooks have a lower resolution of 1024×600, compared to the 1024×768, 9.7″ screen of the iPad, meaning the iPad screen looks much better in comparison (more pixels in a smaller area) and doesn’t suffer from the misshaping of webpages which happens on netbooks.

So far I have only found one thing that really irks me about the iPad and that Is it’s inability to receive files via bluetooth, something that has only bugged me today when I wanted to get some wifi access to the network here at work and needed to install a certificate to my iPad. I know that to wait until I have wifi access so i can receive the certificate via email.

Overall though the experience has been awesome and I’m really looking forward to starting uni with it by my side.