Sony PlayStation

"Tip: Asda's kicked off the PS Vita price war and has it from £197"

PS VITA IS HERE
Tomorrow, following a celeb-packed party at the PS Vita Rooms in London last week, Sony launches the really quite brilliant PlayStation Vita here in the UK.
There’s a stack of launch titles including WipEout 2048, (the superb) FIFA 12, Virtua Tennis 4 and Uncharted: Golden Abyss, with Call of Duty confirmed for an autumn debut – all of which are available either as fiddly, offline game cards or as downloads. The 5-inch OLED touchscreen is stunning, the design’s a winner and the gameplay (powered by quad-core processing) and graphics will blow you away.
Now you just have to decide if all that is worth shelling out £230 (Wi-Fi only) or £280 (Wi-Fi + 3G), plus games (up to £45!). Tip: Asda’s kicked off the PS Vita price war and has it from £197 here. It still won’t be an easy decision, so to help you, check out the full AskMen UK review here. Mine’s going on the birthday list. Which reminds me…

NEW MUST-HAVE APP: CLEAR
Looking for a next-generation take on lists? No, I wasn’t either. But this week, the five-star Clear has found it’s way onto my iPhone and now there’s no turning back. The app makes list-keeping simple, quick and – achieving the impossible – even satisfying to use.
Lists are priority-graded in colour from not-that-important yellow to list-topping, mega-urgent-red. It’s super-intuitive with swipes and pinches and… it’s British! Born in Brighton. So show it some love, as it’s a mightily reasonable 69p on the App Store. Here’s a video to convince you to stick it on the shopping list.

iCADE JR: ARCADE GAMING FOR iPHONE
The original iCade – an arcade-style cabinet gaming controller and dock for your iPad – was a sell-out success. Now its offspring is on the way: iCade Jr. It’s a similar set-up, only smaller to fit your iPhone/iPod Touch. The controls connect via Bluetooth and it works with all compatible game apps, including the 100-title Atari’s Greatest Hits app. Grab one, stick it on your desk and work will be a distant memory. Meanwhile, anyone with a 21^st century Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Gold membership can grab a free demo of EA Sports’ upcoming SSX reboot (ahead of the snowboarding title’s March 2 launch on PS3 and 360) now in the Xbox Live Marketplace, or get it queued to your downloads here.

25,000,000,000 APP DOWNLOADS
More app news for Man vs Tech this week, with word that Apple’s grip on Earth tightens as it hits a staggering 25 billion app downloads from the App Store (at least a billion of which may well be on my cluttered iPhone). To celebrate this milestone, whoever downloads the 25 billionth app wins a $10,000 App Store gift card. How do you organise ten grand’s worth of apps on your homescreen? Check out this fascinating new Pinterest board of random people’s iPhone homescreens for inspiration, and be sure to add your own.

AND FINALLY… HOW MUCH TO BUILD A DEATH STAR?
Students at Lehigh University in the US who run economics blog Centives have figured out how much it would cost to build the ultimate tech: the Death Star. Answer? Approximately $852,000,000,000,000,000 (and that’s just for the materials), equivalent to roughly 13,000 times the world’s GDP. Even if we could afford it (and we most definitely can’t), using Earth’s present steel production rate (they assumed it would be made from steel, like an aircraft carrier), it would take… 833,315 years to build.