Marketing buzzwords 4 lyfe!
In all seriousness, though, the OLED display is one thing I *don't* remember fondly about the Vita, as it was an early gen display with a number of inherent flaws. Above and beyond the "blotches" mentioned, there were a number of issues with it, issues which were rectified by the Vita-2000, a criminally underrated and underappreciated hardware refresh that seems to have been snubbed by most fans of the system in the west:
1) Poor calibration, resulting in gaudy oversaturated colours. The IPS panel in Vita-2000 is well calibrated, and only shows saturation where it's necessary (like in Persona 4 Dancing).
The white point was also way off, which gave the screen this unnatural blue glow, as whites would appear blue-ish.
2) Burn in. Some users had the web browser menu bars burned into their screen, others had game HUDs.
3) very low max brightness. Peaks at 117cdm2, when IPS LCDs were reaching 600cdm2. This made it pretty unusable outdoors.
4) Mura/grain, which renders solid colours as grainy canvases, which is quite noticeable and distracting.
5) Power consumption. Vita-2000's LCD gets the system about 2 hours more battery life out of a charge. One of OLED's strengths, the amazingly deep black levels, were also squandered with Vita, as most of the OS and games aren't designed around black UIs or environments where the pixels are turned off. This isn't a big deal, but it's worth noting.
6) It's covered in greasy plastic. The Vita-2000's LCD is covered in oleophobic glass, which feels much better to the thumb, but also means fingerprints are never a problem. Every time I pull the Vita-2000 out of my pocket the screen is spotless. Meanwhile the Vita-1000 OLED was always covered in distracting fingerprint oil stains. The plastic was also uneven, giving it a cheaper feeling.
7) Limited lifespan. Vita's OLED uses an RGB stripe, so it has a full amount of red, green and blue subpixels. While this is better than an OLED "PenTile" subpixel matrix, which would result in a lower perceived resolution, it means that the image quality degrades over time.
Blue subpixels in OLED displays degrade faster than the others, which results in even worse colour reproduction over the lifespan of the device (Samsung estimated degradation to occur after 18 months of daily use). So a screen that already displays stupidly off colours gets worse over time.
Modern OLED displays have overcome a lot of these problems (1, 3 and 5, number 7 is fixed by using a PenTile subpixel matrix combined with a higher ppi), so I wouldn't mind seeing the tech return in a future handheld either, but the Vita-1000's hasn't aged well by today's standards. The only real benefit today to the Vita-1000's display is better response times, as the deep blacks are wasted since few games and apps show blacks.
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I went off on a tangent there, but that's the thing, the main issue with Vita's messaging in the first year was an abundance of marketing terms which meant nothing to the customer - OLED, twin sticks, rear touchpad, 2ghz quad core (the Cortex A9 cores in the Vita don't actually run at 2ghz anyway), these phrases ultimately carried little meaning. At the end of the day what mattered was the games, and I've had hundreds of hours of fun with my Vita, playing a variety of games that weren't linked to such marketing buzzwords.
While marketing has also played a large role in PS4's success, the difference there was that marketing played to peoples' emotions in a way Vita's didn't. So Sony at least learned from Vita's mistakes there.
It's easy to see in hindsight why the Vita didn't take off as well as we hoped (mainly a reliance on IP in the early days that didn't carry massmarket appeal, poorly defined marketing buzzwords which meant little to the consumer, and a lack of differentiation from the experience people can get from Sony's own consoles in face of the rising convenience of smartphone games).
But at the end of the day the games ended up carrying more weight for how we perceive the system today. And the changing market took Vita to new places, which I liked a lot. Instead of receiving the odd port of games designed for home console and big TVs (as good as some of those were), we saw Sony open the gates to independent developers and the system play host to a bunch of otherwise-overlooked games from Japan whose western releases would have been unthinkable in the market 5-10 years ago. As a handheld it's a superb complement to any other platform, including its closest cousin the 3DS. And ironically, Sony's plans not to release a successor should keep this system kicking about for many years to come, I think. Vita really *does* mean life.