So today saw the release of the long awaited YouTube app for PS Vita, joining the likes of mobile favourites Twitter and Facebook. What baffles me however, is how disjointed each of the applications on PS Vita are.

For those of you who own an Android mobile device (or other smartphone), you will know the joy of using the YouTube application to view a video and using the share option which will allow you to seamlessly post and interact with it across Facebook, Twitter and any other social networking sites.

This feature is shockingly absent on PS Vita. If a Tweet contains a YouTube url, we are treated to a thumbnail image of a scene from the video and, upon clicking on the link, we are instantly brought to the newly installed YouTube application, where we can view and interact with the video at our leisure redirected to the PS Vita’s web browser where we are greeted by the notification that the latest version of Flash or a HTML5 compliant browser are required in order to view the video. So in theory, if we are to view a video that a friend tweets to us on our PS Vita, we must click the link in the Twitter app, copy the name of the video that will not play in the browser and then open up the YouTube application and search for the video.

Why include this thumbnail when we cannot play the video?

For those of us who have attempted to use the PS Vita Facebook application, we are also left puzzled by the fact that video links contain a little “play” button which, when clicked on, will once again redirect us to either the YouTube site or a mobile.facebook.com site, both of which will be unable to play the videos due to the browser’s restrictions.

I know that the PS Vita is a primarily a gaming device, but if these applications are going to be included, they should work on par with their mobile phone counterparts. It’s a small ask for Sony to link to the new YouTube application when clicking on YouTube links, and one that I hope they implement sooner rather than later. The success of these applications relies solely on the support given to them by their original developers, so here’s hoping they are not content with the applications and planning on leaving them as is.

Click the lovely blue play button, it does nothing...

That being said, the Twitter application for PS Vita is a a joy to use, despite one or two slightly baffling design decisions and the YouTube application is also very slick looking, so we’re looking forward to Sony hopefully linking these two together in the near future.

Do you use any of the applications on your PS Vita? Let us know your thoughts on them in the comments section below.