 This is David with The Verge and this is the PlayStation 4. Seven years after the PS3, Sony's built a new console designed to last the next seven years. This console represents Sony's best guess about what we're going to do on our TVs in the next decade and how we're going to do it. But more than anything, it's a $399 love letter to gamers everywhere. Sony learned a lot from its last console, which was essentially a bulky, expensive supercomputer. The PS4 is just about half the width of the original PS3 and also considerably lighter. It's even thinner than Sony's latest ultra-thin PS3, which is a considerable feat. The console ditches the iconic curves of its predecessor for a parallelogram design with sharp sloping edges. It's really nice looking, standing out without being too gaudy. It's certainly prettier than what we've seen of Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One. The front has two USB 3.0 ports next to the slot-loading optical disk drive, and the power and eject buttons slice down the middle of the PS4. On the back of the console is a surprisingly small set of ports. All audio out, HDMI, Ethernet, and a proprietary port for the PlayStation camera. There's no power brick, everything is actually inside the console. It just makes everything smaller and simpler. If you have a PS3, you can even use the same cables you already had hooked up and just drop the new box into your existing setup. Inside the PS4 is some seriously powerful silicon. It has a custom processor with eight AMD Jaguar CPU cores and a next-gen Radeon GPU. It's based on the x86 architecture, which is fairly ubiquitous but also means the PS4 isn't backwards compatible. That means you won't be able to play any PS3 games on this console. It has 8 gigs of memory, a 500 gigabyte hard drive, and a 6-speed Blu-ray drive. For the most part, it's impressively powerful, with plenty of headroom to last the next several years. But there are a couple of odd oversights. The PS4 doesn't support 802.11ac Wi-Fi or 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi, both of which would have allowed for faster, more reliable internet connections. And they're clearly the future, it's just a weird thing to leave out. Ultimately, the look and feel of the console are nice, but the controller is what you'll end up holding in your hands all day as you play games. It's called the DualShock 4, and it's easily the best controller Sony's ever made. It looks a fair amount like the DualShock 3 from the PlayStation 3, but it has longer, much more comfortable grips with better spaced concave analog sticks, more comfortable triggers on the back, and only a couple of awkward buttons in the middle. The DualShock 4 also has a light bar on the back, which the system can use to identify the controllers, along with a touchpad in the middle that works well for some things but won't exactly replace a mouse. There's even a speaker in the controller itself, plus a headphone jack. That means you can use it for voice chat or even plug in any old pair of headphones and port all the PS4's audio through the controller instead. The first thing you see after a quick, mostly painless setup process is a blue screen, with Sony's normal soft music and moving backgrounds, plus a list of everything you've ever done on your console. It shows all the games you've played in reverse chronological order with your library at the very end of the list. At first it makes getting to the games you want to play really easy, but the long list you can't sort yourself gets cumbersome really fast. Click into any game you've ever installed or played and you'll see the most recent activity within that game. What your friends are playing, what they're sharing from that game, and achievements they've earned. All the social gaming is tied really tightly into the Core OS, and it makes playing with or alongside your friends a lot more fun. There's also an endless stream of your friends' activity in the What's New section of the menu, which is cool, but it can get really cluttered if you have more than a few friends. Flick the analog stick up and you're taken into the primary menu. That's where you see your profile, friend requests, notifications, and settings. There are still a lot of text menus to go through, a lot of options to check and select, but the interface is really fast and mostly looks really good on the TV. If nothing else, it's the speed that makes it a lot more fun to use. Even switching between users is easier than ever, using your controllers and the light bars to figure out who's trying to do something. You'll need to pay $49.99 a year for a PlayStation Plus subscription in order to join others in online gaming. All the system's social features are still free, so you don't necessarily need to pay just to interact with your friends, but with that subscription you also get discounts on games, free games, and more. It's really worth the price of admission. There are a few media apps that come with the PS4, from Netflix and Hulu to Crackle and NBA Game Time. They're mostly good apps, and Sony likes to talk about how popular the PS3 was for Netflix, but the apps are clearly not the point of the console. They're all buried in one menu item on the home screen, and the library itself is pretty small. And as if to further drive the point home, Sony's actually removed the ability to play back local content like music, videos, and photos on the console. Every single thing about the PS4 is designed in service of making games great, and nothing else. Like the totally seamless way to share clips from your gameplay on Twitch or Ustream, or to see what your friends are doing. Of course, watching people play games is going to get a lot better when the actual games themselves get better. Most of the PS4's launch titles look great, more detailed and impressive than ever, but most of them just look better. There's not really much in the way of meaningful, different gameplay here. A few games, like Need for Speed Rivals, even run into occasional framerate issues. It looks great when it works well, but it doesn't always work well. And that's kind of worrisome given that this is the console that's supposed to have plenty of power left to spare for the next decade. Knack is one of the big exclusives to the PS4's launch, and the game's a lot of fun. It's not overwhelmingly impressive technically, but it's a fun, relentless game you can play for hours. Games like Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty Ghosts don't feel that different than they did on the old consoles, and while Killzone Shadow Fall is beautiful, it's really just a basic shooter. But that's the thing about launch games, they're almost never good. And the PS4 is certain to get good games, even if the most fun game right now is Resogun, an ultra-simple game that feels a bit like Geometry Wars. What's coming next is really what's most interesting about the PS4. This is a console designed to last a long time, to sell eight years from now as much as to sell today. The ability to stream games from your PS4 to your PlayStation Vita is remarkable, and works really well even if it's not always optimized for the small screen you're using. The PlayStation Camera, for now, is incredibly basic. You get a couple of voice controls, and it does a nice job of identifying you, but there's no game support or even really useful system control. That could come soon, though. Even the PlayStation app for Android and iOS, which for now acts mostly as a better alternative to the on-screen keyboard, has some huge potential. And in general, the PS4 is all about potential. It's a faster, simpler console with a great new design and a great new controller. It has a fun few games, though the lineup's going to get a lot better over time. Sony fixed a lot of what ailed the PS3, but it's clearly only at the beginning of its journey here. If you don't have your heart set on buying a console right now, the best course of action is to wait. We haven't seen what the Xbox One can do yet, and even the PS4 has a lot of growing left to do. But it's clear that Sony's built a fast, useful console designed to make a lot of gamers very happy, and there's little doubt this $399 device will do just that. The only question is how long it's going to take.