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 scr

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.