6 ms·

Smartphone UIs are just too slow. Ever used a ps vita? Incredibly fast ui. Once you experience that it's kind of shocking how bad smartphones are. Texting o

Smartphone UIs are just too slow. Ever used a ps vita? Incredibly fast ui. Once you experience that it's kind of shocking how bad smartphones are. Texting on smartphones is a horrible experience that hasn't improved since 2008.

selfhoster11 5y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted. This entirely matches up with my experience of smartphones. If you are running a non-top of the line Android device, random slowdowns are not unusual.
- anthk 5y ago
  Gaming requires a much faster input polling. Also, Vita's batteries are much worse than the ones for smartphones.
sgtnoodle 5y ago
I suspect there's a technical reason for that, rather than pure incompetence. The PS Vita likely devotes most of its power to its CPU and GPU hardware. Its screen resolution is also relatively low, so it doesn't take very many cycles to render. A smartphone has a tighter power budget. For one thing, the battery is significantly smaller to keep the phone thin. It has to power the cell modem constantly. The display resolution is significantly higher, so there's one or two orders of magnitude more pixels. The PS Vita menu is probably getting re-rendered at 60Hz in a loop that's also sampling for input events. The menu is just another "game". The smartphone menu is probably getting indirectly rendered through an abstraction that allows the framebuffer to only minimally be updated as display elements change. Events are likely coming in asynchronously rather than being polled. The rendered image looks the same, but there was significantly more code in the path vs. the game console. You could eliminate all that complex code and make a phone UI feel snappy like a game, but the power consumption would shoot up and drastically reduce on-time for the same battery size.
- anthk 5y ago
  Or the opposite. Fast and battery saving UI snappiness, but atrocious I/O on background tasks up to the point of getting your messages and notifications delayed. And notability worse downloads.
- lubesGordi 5y ago
  The technical reason is obvious. App development occurs on top of a massively bloated and ineffecient UI toolkit where you can dev most of your UI in xml. I would be absolutely shocked if ps vita used anything like that. They're using opengl or similar and coding the UI is going to require more coding expertise but the performance is going to be great. You could do the same on a smartphone of course, and get maybe even better perf compared to a vita, but no one does (unless its a game).

selfhoster11 5y ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted. This entirely matches up with my experience of smartphones. If you are running a non-top of the line Android device, random slowdowns are not unusual.

anthk 5y ago
Gaming requires a much faster input polling. Also, Vita's batteries are much worse than the ones for smartphones.

sgtnoodle 5y ago

I suspect there's a technical reason for that, rather than pure incompetence. The PS Vita likely devotes most of its power to its CPU and GPU hardware. Its screen resolution is also relatively low, so it doesn't take very many cycles to render. A smartphone has a tighter power budget. For one thing, the battery is significantly smaller to keep the phone thin. It has to power the cell modem constantly. The display resolution is significantly higher, so there's one or two orders of magnitude more pixels. The PS Vita menu is probably getting re-rendered at 60Hz in a loop that's also sampling for input events. The menu is just another "game". The smartphone menu is probably getting indirectly rendered through an abstraction that allows the framebuffer to only minimally be updated as display elements change. Events are likely coming in asynchronously rather than being polled. The rendered image looks the same, but there was significantly more code in the path vs. the game console. You could eliminate all that complex code and make a phone UI feel snappy like a game, but the power consumption would shoot up and drastically reduce on-time for the same battery size.

anthk 5y ago
Or the opposite. Fast and battery saving UI snappiness, but atrocious I/O on background tasks up to the point of getting your messages and notifications delayed. And notability worse downloads.
lubesGordi 5y ago
The technical reason is obvious. App development occurs on top of a massively bloated and ineffecient UI toolkit where you can dev most of your UI in xml. I would be absolutely shocked if ps vita used anything like that. They're using opengl or similar and coding the UI is going to require more coding expertise but the performance is going to be great. You could do the same on a smartphone of course, and get maybe even better perf compared to a vita, but no one does (unless its a game).