Thought I would write a quick post about my PS4 thoughts after 24 hours. These are my thoughts as a gaming fan/consumer.
Prior to setup. I had already purchased a 1TB SSHD from Scan in advance. After a bunch of research this seemed to review pretty well and people had no issues with the install.
- Principally as mandatory installs will mean that the shipped 500GB would run out fairly quickly, so might as well replace before I fill the old one. Can ebay the old HDD for £30-40 without any bother.
- Secondly - its been shown already that using SSD or SSHD drives improves performance. As big SSD's are crazy money, for me SSHD provides the best trade off between speed and size at not a bad price point.
So cracked open the PS4 - its built so you can easily replace the Hard Disk without invalidating the warranty and its a very simple job. One nice touch I noticed is that the HDD caddy even has noise dampening screws to minimise noise and shake. Its the little things like that which make a difference.
Anyone who has used a USB stick to update PS3 firmware knows the drill about copying the file onto the stick. Worth noting if you are replacing the HDD, you need to use the full resinstallation package which is around 800mb rather than just the update which is around 300mb.
- Full 800mb package can be downloaded here along with the instructions
- Update only is here
Installation takes around 5 mins or so and then you are all set.
First thing you notice is how quiet the system is. Compared to pretty much all generations of PS3 the PS4 is a different league. Power consumption is a little higher, but I'd imagine this will improve over time much like PS3 did. Secondly the speed - wow, you can jump in and out of games, menus, you name it without any pauses. Browsing the PlayStation store which can be a bit of a chore on PS3 now glides smoothly and no doubt will be improved further as refinements are made. Games install in very little time and the fact you can trigger them remotely from the new iOS/Android apps (which are equally good) is brilliant.
I also setup the PS Vita to work as a second screen. Thats a really cool feature allowing you to use the handheld as either a primary or second screen, so in effect your partner could be watching TV whilst you stream your game live to the Vita instead of the TV, or alternatively as a companion screen for particular games. Great for some games, but games like COD are probably a little tricky as they are very fast paced rely on accuracy so was badly outgunned.
This leads me onto probably the biggest point of difference and one which may be overlooked in other reviews as its hard to put into words, but I'm struck with the tightness of the overall integration. Its really been totally rebuilt with the user experience front of mind, for example logging into PSN also silently recognised my Music Unlimited account and loaded my playlists, I was then playing music whilst installing games. Multi-tasking was basically impossible with PS3 due to memory limitations and Cell Processor Architecture, but now its very much part of the experience. Mindful that PS3 was launched in a world before smartphones & Facebook - social is now also a key part of the experience.
I'm incredibly impressed with the overall package and much like comparing Day 1 PS3 to what it can do now, its incredibly exciting to think where PlayStation will take PS4 even in the short term. Thus fixing some of the things like mp3 playback & DLNA, adding the missing catchup TV services and expanding the game lineup will hopefully be the priorities.
So to conclude, it really is an amazing piece of hardware - congrats to the guys at Sony Computer Entertainment.
