Digital Culture

At first glance can you tell what the object is? For gamers or people who play games and are familiar with consoles and console games, can easily recognize the PS4 as a console. With the notoriety of the PlayStation, it's not difficult to figure out what the object is, especially since it bears the Sony brand. What materials is it made of?   PCBs, magnets, LCDs and a plastic outer casing. What is the technology? A gaming console Specs: Single-chip custom processor CPU : x86-64 AMD “Jaguar”, 8 cores GPU : 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD Radeon™ based graphics engine Memory: GDDR5 8GB Storage size: 500GB, 1TB BD/DVD drive: BD x 6 CAV, DVD x 8 CAV Input/Output: Super-Speed USB (USB 3.1 Gen1) port × 2 AUX port × 1 Ethernet（10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T）×1 Networking: IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Bluetooth®v4.0 Power: AC 100-240V, 50/60Hz Power Consumption: Max. 165W AV Output: HDMI™ out port (HDR output supported) Is this a completely new kind of technolog...

Sony, in full Sony Corporation, is a major Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronics products. It also was involved in films, music, and financial services, among other ventures. By 1960 business in the United States had prompted the creation of Sony Corporation of America, with headquarters in New York City. When the company opened its store on Fifth Avenue in 1962, it unfurled the first Japanese flag to be flown in the United States since the beginning of World War II. At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Sony introduced the MD-5, the first all-transistor desktop calculator. In 1968 the company shipped its first Trinitron colour television. By 1971, 40 percent of Japanese households had colour television sets, so Sony introduced the first colour video cassette recorder (VCR), which led to its introduction of the Betamax VCR in 1975. The Betamax, though widely considered the best VCR technology ever developed, was more expensive than its competitor, the VHS (Video Home System). ...

Meanwhile, the PlayStation Store is very similar to the current PS3 store, which has made enormous strides over the last few years — but it shares the discoverability and organization problems of the existing store as well. It's not fair to crucify Sony over this, as every online marketplace shares these issues to some degree or another. But we're still waiting to see if anyone can address these problems.

The PS4 hints at plenty of other possibilities. Local network play via the PS Vita has an enormous amount of potential. The PlayStation App and even the Playstation Camera may provide opportunities for developers to broaden the appeal of the PlayStation 4 beyond the hardcore audience it currently seems so intent on courting. Unlike the PlayStation 3, Sony's latest effort was built to evolve. But the PlayStation 4's focus on gaming — and only gaming — is undermined by a distinct lack of compelling software. That failing is sure to improve — better games and more of them will appear on the PlayStation 4 — but right now, this is a game console without a game to recommend it. Early adopters of the PS4 this fall are buying potential energy. We're just waiting for a place to spend it.

Online Play The PS4 makes some fundamental improvements to basic network functionality. You can now join friends' games from your friends list. The PS4 also introduces game-independent party chat for up to eight people, a godsend for multiplayer gamers hoping to avoid toxic public lobby audio. Improvements The PS4's home screen includes a feed of your friends' activity called "What's New," and this demonstrates quite a bit of potential. It shows what games your friends started to play, when they're livestreaming and … maybe too much stuff, actually. The What's New feed is a wall of informational text and from a distance, it's difficult to parse. This is indicative of a general tendency toward too many options, and an excess of surfaced information throughout the PS4's PSN functions. There are other additions that seem beneficial, but have strange oversights that make them potentially problematic. The PSN friends limit has been increased...

User Interface & Experience At first glance, it may appear that the PS4's user interface shares little in common with the PlayStation 3's "XrossMediaBar" interface, a familiar sight for owners of Sony's 2006-era televisions. But the PS4's interface is again similar to Sony's current televisions and with use, a clear evolution of the XMB is apparent. It retains its predecessor's speed, while adding a flexibility that the rigid XMB hierarchy never allowed. Improvements Little things stand out. You can temporarily suspend a game at any time by hitting the PlayStation button and, say, change your display or audio settings without quitting the game in question. After seven or eight years of the Xbox 360 and PS3, navigating the PS4's menus and UI quickly and with little lag is one of the more refreshing elements of the next-gen console experience. One major, appreciated change: the bifurcated User/PSN ID system of the PS3 is gone. You can now...

The DualShock 4 isn't without some minor issues: the new options and share buttons are far too flush with the face of the controller and take too much pressure to use. It quickly proved easier to use the PlayStation button — now situated between the controller's analog sticks — to suspend a title to take quick breaks. The new touchpad works well for certain functions, like selecting weapon modes in Killzone: Shadow Fall. But it proved a poor mouse substitute in Assassin's Creed 4's map screen, with slow, latency-prone movement. We'll need more opportunities to use it in more titles before we can determine whether this is a hardware or software problem. But our biggest complaint for a controller that some at Polygon otherwise consider the best they've ever used: over the course of 100-hundred plus hours with the DualShock 4, the battery life appears to sit somewhere in the 7- to 8-hour neighborhood, a fraction of the 30-hour battery life on the DualShock 3. A...

We can say this unequivocally: The DualShock 4 is the best controller Sony has ever made. Now that the PlayStation 4 and a new console generation are upon us, a contingent of Polygon's editorial staff feels free to finally admit a deep, unbridled hatred of the DualShock 3. The sticks were too close together, too squishy; the triggers weren't triggers; those of us with bigger hands had difficulty using the controller for very long. DuelShock 4 Sony has solved every one of these problems with the DualShock 4. Its sticks are farther apart, with semi-concave pits in the middle designed to hold the tips of your thumbs in place. The shoulders feature actual concave triggers with pull similar to an Xbox 360 controller. The controller is just a little heavier, just a little bigger. It's much more comfortable to hold over long periods of time. Making even die-hard DualShock 3 haters on the Polygon staff converts, the DualShock 4 is the most immediately apparent improvement o...

The PS4 is Sony's most attractively designed piece of hardware. It's a beautiful system, with a sharp, slightly angled profile accented by a light bar that acts as a console status indicator. On the back, PS4 has gone digital-only with HDMI/optical ports, and no analog audio or video outputs. We appreciate the internal power supply — it sounds like a small thing, but it's one less object to sit on the shelf next to or behind the PlayStation 4. In the bad column, it's a collection of moderate to minor annoyances. The PS4 doesn't support the new 802.11ac wireless standard, instead relying on an 802.11b/g/n radio at 2.4 GHz — no 5 GHz support here either, all of which is disappointing to see on a consumer device in 2013. More annoyingly to many on staff, the PS4 doesn't include an IR port for universal remotes, nor does it support Logitech's PlayStation 3 Bluetooth Harmony adapter or the PS3 Bluetooth Blu-ray remote. This omission seems to signal Sony's...

In the seven years since the introduction of the PlayStation 3, we've seen our gaming consoles transform into living-room hubs through constant evolution and software updates. Those updates weren't always smooth – though on PS3, they were always happening – but it's easy to see just how far the platform has come. Meanwhile, the designers of the PlayStation 4 were taking notes and designing a console that, feature by feature, sought to address the failings of its predecessor. The PS3 was notoriously difficult to program for, thanks to its proprietary silicon. So the PS4 was built to be developer-friendly, with a familiar, PC-like architecture. The PS3 was announced with a bizarre, boomerang-shaped controller, and launched with the rumble-free Sixaxis controller before settling into the never-great DualShock 3 controller. So the PS4 comes with the DualShock 4, unarguably the best controller Sony's ever made. And the PS3 launched at an abnormally high price point, costin...

PS4 measures approximately 275 mm (width) × 53 mm (height) × 305 mm (length), excluding the largest projection.  The PS4 is light and slim compared to the Xbox One, with its power supply built inside as opposed to a power brick.  It's matte on the bottom and glossy on the top, which contrasts well.  Its weight is approximately 2.8 kg (6.1 pounds).  It is only available in one color at launch, Jet Black. The PS4 is worlds of a difference lighter and more stylish than the launch PS3, and even the PS3 slim. The angular, parallelogram like design has been highly acclaimed by critics and gamers worldwide, and has been praised compared to the bulky, all glossy and vented Xbox One.  The top glossy part of the console can pop off to reveal the replaceable  hard drive.