One of the more finer aspects of my testing has been charging the Vita. Since the battery isn’t super great and I travel quite a bit (hence my importing early too), I’ve decided to attempt to figure out how I can charge my Vita while a) on a plane or in a car b) at a hotel and c) at home. I also wanted to know how many chargers I’d need to travel with as I need to bring a ton of electronic gadgets with me but tend to bring only the bare minimum of charging devices to get by. I use a lot of 3rd party USB cables, like ones for my PSP slim and 3DS instead their bulky first party chargers.

I’ve come across some interesting results and would love to hear from other importers what they’ve discovered as well.

Vita Charger PCH-ZAC1:

Using the standard out of the box Vita charging “brick” (PCH-ZAC1), this little unit requires a power cable (same one used by the PSPgo brick) and a Vita specific USB cable to charge. Using this setup one can charge their Vita while it is either OFF or ON and have a nice long cable(s) to move around and still play. Works get for home.

USB “brick” chargers:

These little bricks are the same type you’d get with an iPhone or iPad purchase. I’ve even gotten them with my Nook Color or Nook Touch. You can also buy these off the shelf from various vendors like Belkin or Griffin. I tend to take an iPhone USB brick charger with me every time I travel. They are very compact and have always charger whatever I’d need to charger except my Nooks. Well, I’ve found another thing that won’t charge with them and it’s the Vita. Vita will not accept a charge from an iPhone charger nor the larger, more powerful iPad charger.

I then tested my Nook chargers. Both work with the Vita. The Vita charged while either ON or OFF, currently the Vita is charging while I play Uncharted using the Nook Touch charger.

Clearly I’m confused as to why the iPhone and iPad bricks do not work yet the Nook bricks do. Weird. Useful for traveling though as I have a trip scheduled soon and will certainly be bringing along a Nook charger instead of just an iPhone charger for the hotel.

USB charging via PC:

Vita will charge via PC when the Vita is OFF. I believe this is the same standard as mentioned in the manual. Handy I guess when all you got is a laptop to charge it with but it most be OFF to accept the charge.

USB charging via external battery:

So because I wanted to charge my Vita and other devices on a plane, I purchased a Mophie Powerstation to do just that. Everything I’ve tested it with it will charge except the Vita. The Vita will not charge either OFF or ON. Very saddening as 3 hours of battery life won’t even last a cross country flight. Sony is releasing their own external battery pack but I’m not clear on it’s release date and it surely won’t be “soon”.

USB charging in a car:

I haven’t yet tested charging in a car using a USB cig lighter adapter (something I use for iPhone/iPad) but will soon. I do believe an official Sony car adapter is forth coming as well.

So, that’s what I’ve tested. Please let me know if you find something else, perhaps I’ve missed something in my testing. And for the record, yes, USB Power Supply setting is checked to ON.

Fat Princess is a great strategy game with good artwork and excellent humor. Not to be missed on the PS3 and coming soon to the PSP from Supervillain Studios.

In order to really test out if PS3 wifi is slow or if it was my network, I set out to do some testing. I used speedtest.net for all my tests including those run from within the PS3 web browser. Be sure to set your PS3 web browser home page to be a blank page as you need every drop of memory available or else the browser will crash during the testing.

PS3 WiFi via Airport Extreme base station with 80% signal strength

And it’s complete garbage. This was actually faster than what I tested over the weekend when I was only getting 1500 kb/s which prompted more testing and a solution.

PS3 WiFi via Airport Express repeater with 100% signal strength

I used an Airport Express plugged in next to the PS3 and set it up to repeat the main WiFi signal from the Airport Extreme. This basically boosted my PS3′s signal strength from 80% to 100% when the repeater was online.

The results aren’t stellar by any means but show a 30% improvement in speed. Why? Signal strength is really the only thing I could see that changed. The WiFi technology deployed by Apple is the same across their products so it’s not a WiFi base station issue from what I can tell.

PS3 Ethernet via Airport Express repeater

I then decided to plug the PS3 directly into the repeaters ethernet port thus removing the use of the PS3 wifi card altogether. To the PS3 software I’m effectively using a wired connection when in truth I’m still using wireless.

And this is when it hit me. Sony has either A) put a crap WiFi card in the PS3 and/or B) use a crap driver to control it. Plugging into “ethernet” gave me the output I would have expected via WiFi. I pay for fast service and this is what shows in the test.

MacBook Pro WiFi via Airport Extreme base station

Finally just to show I’m not crazy, I tested my MacBook Pro running wirelessly directly to the Airport Extreme base station with no repeater.

It came back even faster.

If any PS3 owners would like to try running some of these tests please do so and post your results here. In order to get the image file off the PS3, be sure to save it from the web browser then transfer it via a USB thumb drive or camera memory card.

Sony, fix your sh*t. This is ridiculous. People have been complaining about this since the PS3 launched yet it’s been ignored. A modern piece of technology should not have such craptastic WiFi speeds.

I’ve found that over the years I’ve collected quite a few games. I haven’t counted recently but the numbers are mind boggling. What I’ve also found that is out of all the games I buy the majority of them just sit on the shelf. I only play a handful of games at a time and when I’m done with them, which sometimes could be years, I put another game in my rotation.

So this year I’ve taken a completely different approach to my game purchases although there have been a few slip ups. I’ve focused mainly on quality titles and I’ve only purchased games on 3 platforms so far this year out of a possible 6. I’m making this list to remind myself of what games I truly want to play this year and that I’ll only be buying those games. There is some wiggle room, I’ll allow for a total of 6 game purchases outside of the list. So far I’ve already spent 3 of those.

The Buy List

Playstation 3
• LittleBigPlanet
• Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds (bought)
• Metal Gear Solid 4 ¹
• Grand Theft Auto IV (bought) ¹
• LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures
• SingStar
• Civilization Revolution
• SOCOM: Confrontation
• Fallout 3 ¹

Playstation Portable (PSP)
• Downstream Panic (bought)
• Patapon (bought)
• God of War: Chains of Olympus
• Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (bought) ¹
• NCAA Football 09 ¹
• Secret Agent Clank
• N+ ¹

Nintendo Wii
• Mario Kart Wii (bought)
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl (bought)
• Animal Crossing Wii

Nintendo DS
• Civilization Revolution

Xbox 360
• Banjo-Kazooie 3
• Gears of War 2

PC/Mac
• Mass Effect (PC) ¹
• Starcraft 2 (Mac) ²
• Spore (PC/Mac) ³

The challenge will be to see if I can hold myself to buying only games on the list. This is the first time I’ve tried to really limit what games I buy. We’ll see how it goes. So far I’ve bought a few impulse games. The only one I really wanted was a good basketball game. At least I bought it while it was on sale.

The Impulse Buy List (5 of 6)

Playstation 3
• The Bigs
• NBA 2k8
• MLB ’08: The Show
• Karaoke Revolution

Xbox 360
• LOST
• Naruto

PC/Mac
• Sins of a Solar Empire (PC)

1. These games aren’t 100% for sure purchases. There is a slight chance I won’t buy them due to not enough time to play them, poor reviews, or lack of interest once they’re released. I won’t swap these games for other titles so it’s either the game on the list or nothing.
2. Can’t believe I forgot this one on the original list. Who knows, it may not ship this year anyway.
3. Forgot this one as well. Sort of up in the air on this one but it looks very interesting.

Microsoft is promoting one of the worst consumer unfriendly DRM schemes ever produced. Read the following threads below to get a more detailed view on the issue. Microsoft has yet to fix the issue or publicly acknowledge they are working on a solution.

• Can’t play any XBLA games offline after RRoD (This thread is 141 pages as of this writing)
• Carcassonne expansions fail to load
• Golden Axe won’t registered as paid title (All Sega XBLA titles have this bug)
• Puzzle Quest DRM bug causing it to stay in trial mode
• Truth Serum – Digital Rights Management DRM

To mainstream media outlets: Get your heads out of the sand and start taking objective views towards video games. How about discussing the options that parents have for limiting mature content on game consoles instead of playing into the fears of the masses.

If you buy digital content from the Xbox Live Marketplace and your Xbox 360 dies due to the known issues of “red rings of death”, you’re rights as a consumer will become SEVERELY compromised.

Just thought I’d point this out.

Simple; Microsoft is either not business savvy (debateable but doubtful in this case) or they’re developing their own portable console that will launch with a version of Halo. I really can’t think of another smart reason for canning a Halo game what was obvoiusly going to sell a ton of units given the DS’s installed base.

Only time will tell but I hope we see a portable Halo in the next year.

Bomberman Live! was released today for XBLA. It’s one of the best Bomberman games I’ve ever played and that’s saying a lot. I’ve pretty much played them all after the course of it’s 20+ year history. Saturn Bomberman is still my favorite. XBLA is missing the rideable creatures and team play but otherwise it’s perfect.