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…yeah, that’s a bad, bad design flaw. But not one that can’t be improved upon.
Thanks, Green Mage.
From an engineering point of view, that looks bad. I realize that the screen size is vital, and that the button placement is also critical, but my simple solution is to rotate the damn button axis. Just slant the button alignment 30 or so degrees clockwise and you wont have nearly as bad of pad placement. Sure, the buttons wont align exactly the same way, but think about how you would hold this handheld, vs how you would hold a PS2 controller. this set up actually looks like a step back from the trend of slanted button alignment which had made controllers less obnoxious to wield.
These people are too worried about their precious symmetry apparently to make sense.
When I buy one of these, I am gonna hack the thing open and put the buttons in right. Then I’m gonna take a picture and send it back to Sony, and tell them that I kick more ass than their hardware engineers. And I nearly flunked out of the college of engineering, I wonder what that says about their mechanical engineers…
Wow, look who thinks he’s clever Dan, P$P and $ony. I’m completly amazed. No, really, that has to be the most clever thing I’ve ever seen. Bravo. Bravo.
Having the button only partially over a sensor is an idiotic idea, especially this way. However, it wouldn’t cause much problem for myself. I just roll my thumb from button to button, so I would always end up hitting the right side of the square button. Hell, I look at my first PS2 controller, and the inner parts of the button have the ink worn off.
Edit: Did anyone else notice the guy with the camera reflecting in the screen in GM’s pic?
… I did now! 
Well, I was gonna respond to the Pickle but Epic made my exact point. So I’m not gonna waste my time with it.
Now that I’ve actually seen an image of what the flaw looks like…that is quite a design flaw.
The Pentium bug was something that was pretty famous at the time (which sorta surprises me you didn’t know about it, Frame :P) but now seems to have been swept under the carpet. Part of that is due to Intel’s regained good name, though.
Basically it was a small bug that had to do with floating point division, but what hurt Intel’s reputation the most was their response to it. First they denied it, then they asked users to prove that it would affect them adversely before they would replace it. They eventually gave in and offered to replace them for free, which they should have done from the beginning. It set a precedent because it established that if a product is faulty, it is up to the end user (not the producer) whether it should get replaced.
(There’s a good joke about the bug… “How many Pentiums does it take to screw in a light bulb?” “8.1248192848192, give or take 10.”)
If you wanted to…couldn’t you just open it up, and re-align the sensor? He said it is a full size sensor, just off to the right, correct? Seems like an easy problem to fix =(
Then you void the warranty right away and risk losing a lot of money. I for one don’t like opening electronics just to optimize them (computers are different though). The warranty better be up before I open something. Besides, if it was just a matter of moving something over, I’m sure Sony would have done that.
I wa gonna reply earlier, but HIryuu pretty much said what I was going to say (about the architecture thing).