What's in a name? If my sudden enthusiasm for PS Vita is anything to go by, rather a lot.

To be fair, my new found optimism for Sony's latest handheld has very little to do with said name change, even if I wholeheartedly approve of PS Vita and its low-fat breakfast yoghurt vibes.

In reality, one of the many fleeting announcements made by SCE CEO Kaz Hirai during the firm's E3 press briefings had a much greater bearing on my view.

Specifically, it's Sony's yet-to-be-defined approach to social networking on Vita that fills me with the most faith.

Picture perfect?

It's worth pointing out that all I'm going on here is a couple of screenshots.

Hirai, speaking with all the fluidity of a mechanised clone, unveiled two new social features on their way to PS Vita: Party Room and Near – the latter bizarrely pronounced 'niar', presumably as a result of some market research carried out by Loyd Grossman.

Promptly nothing was revealed about either feature in truth, but "social connection tool" Near in particular caught my eye, simply because the attached screenshot looked so familiar.

It looked like Game Center, or OpenFeint, or Scoreloop. It looked very, very mobile.

PlayStation Sweet

That was an especially important revelation for me. Long ago on these very pages, before the existence Sony's PSP successor had even been announced, I was casting doom upon its chances, purely because my gut told me Sony would do all within its power to avoid taking on smartphones.

PSP couldn't be branded a failure, but it never reached the heights of its PlayStation brethren because it was first undermined by DS, and then finally swept away in the west by the current appetite for apps. PSP2, I feared, would follow the exact same path, offering up the same handheld model albeit with flashier graphics, more powerful hardware, and the ability to make ice cream out of thin air.

No doubt simply to spite me, the unveiling of PlayStation Suite proved me wrong, at least in part.

While Xperia Play offers a mixed bag of highs and lows (the concept behind it is spot on, but its delivery in my view is somewhat wonky), ventures such as PlayStation Suite prove Sony is entirely aware of consumer prevalence for smartphone games and is doing its best to accommodate, rather than combat, that desire.

Though NGP seemed like a compromise in that respect, resembling the PSP2 model I suspected they'd adopt, but with Suite tacked on almost at the last minute to appeal to the mobile market at the same time, conversely PS Vita now appears a more sophisticated device.

Nothing is tacked on here – this is a device where the kind of social networking options built into the majority of games on smartphones is set to be key.

Eye on iOS

It is, in summary, a post iOS device. Available in both wi-fi only and 3G equipped models, PS Vita offers consumers the kind of phone-without-a-phone experience iPod touch has made its signature over the course of the last few years, for a similar price.

Yes, many smaller smartphone developers will likely find the prospect of working on PS Vita's hardware out of their reach, but for the bigger boys – EA, Activision and the like – Sony's new handheld is a gift from God.

It offers them the prospect of selling the kinds of games they already make for HD consoles – a model they're still infinitely more comfortable with – to the kind of consumers smartphones have mopped up so successfully.

Why? Because it looks as if Sony wants to merge the two markets, cherry picking the social slant of mobile gaming and dropping it into the console model the industry has practised for decades.

Near and Party Room, if pulled off, mean PS Vita will be able to successfully occupy the void between more typical handhelds such as PSP and 3DS and the likes of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Rather than running ill-advised ad campaigns claiming consumers would get bored of iOS and would eventually want to make the leap to 'big boy games' on PSP, PS Vita draws Sony closer to the market it once despised.

It may well act as a highly profitable stepping stone for consumers who favour big blockbuster releases, but don't want to miss out on the social gaming tools smartphones have to offer.

And all this from some snapshots shown briefly in a press conference.

Of course, if Sony messes up Party Room and Near come release, I'll end up eating my words, but for now PS Vita represents a tantalising challenge to the mobile market.

Despite the attention being lavished upon the handheld's name, last night's press conference proved that a picture or two is most definitely more powerful than a couple of new words.