I did not think for a second I was going to be impressed by the PlayStation Portal, Sony's small-screen Remote Play solution for the PS5. With Remote Play already working great on tablets and phones, and controller solutions like the Backbone designed specifically for playing console games remotely, the Portal seemed like a solution to a problem no one had. Why spend $200 on a single-purpose device when there are much cheaper solutions already available? And yet, after spending time with the PlayStation Portal, I gotta say… this thing rules. That's not to say I wouldn’t change anything about it. In fact, it has some missing features that make me scratch my head, but my initial skepticism has been replaced by enthusiasm.
Bigger Is Better
First off, when it comes to the "just use your phone" argument against the Portal, that disintegrates once you see the screen. It's not OLED, which is a bummer, but it's an extremely high-quality 8" LCD screen. That's much bigger than my iPhone 13 Pro Max, and it really looks fantastic. Colors are extremely vivid and absolutely pop. There's no smearing or ghosting whatsoever, and when things are in motion they look exactly like you'd expect them to look. The viewing angle, too, is quite nice: you can freely tilt it in whatever way is most comfortable while you're using it without losing color or detail. Everything just looks crisp and alive on the screen, and I really do prefer it over using Remote Play on my phone.
On the opposite extreme, if you use Remote Play on a full-sized tablet, you get a bigger screen. That might be the best way to strike the perfect balance between portability and screen real-estate, but you still have to supply a controller, which, given the fact you clearly own a PS5, is not that big of a deal. However, the advantage of the Portal over a tablet is you get the good sized screen with the controller built right in into an all-in-one solution, so you can hold onto the Portal and play your games in any position you like. Playing on a tablet with a controller means you need to place it on a surface, probably with a stand, which makes it kind of hard to play if you're, say, sitting on the bus or even your couch.
Because it's effectively a DualSense with the middle stretched and turned into a screen, the Portal is instantly familiar to feel and use. It even has the DualSense features like vibration and resistive triggers. The only feature it's missing is the touch pad, but a quick tap of the screen brings up a virtual replacement. I had to figure this out myself, because there's no mention of it anywhere in the sparse manual that comes with the Portal, but the functionality of every part of the traditional DualSense controller is right there literally at your fingertips.
Yes, Backbone makes a version of its controller attachment specifically for PlayStation games, with all the same buttons, but it lacks the extra features of the DualSense. Look, I really appreciate the Backbone and I don't want to sound like I'm knocking it, but the Portal is just so much more of a polished controller. It's exactly what you would expect from a dedicated, first-party device in terms of fit and finish.
The Portal comes in at roughly 1.17 pounds (for comparison, my iPhone 13 Pro Max with Backbone weighs 0.96 pounds). I was actually surprised at that result when I plopped it on the scale – I thought it was less than that, because it feels light and comfortable, without coming off as cheap, and I never got tired of holding it. I used it sitting on my couch, laying in bed, and even at a coffee shop, and never felt like I needed to put it down and take a break.
Since it is so much lighter than I was anticipating, and the screen is really bright, I wasn't expecting much from the battery life – if the notoriously short-lived DualSense is anything to go by it was never going to be amazing. When we previewed the Portal back in August, the battery size had yet to be locked down, much less announced. Sony did tell another outlet it was aiming for seven to nine hours, but didn't set it in stone.
I played Final Fantasy VII Remake, Astro's Playroom, and Spider-Man 2, swapping between them over the course of my battery test without ever shutting down the Portal, and I got 4.5 hours of use with the brightness turned up to 100% and the volume at around 50%. The Nintendo Switch OLED gets roughly the same battery life under ideal conditions, and the Portal easily beats the Steam Deck, which often struggles to hit two hours. Both of those devices are doing much heavier lifting than the Portal, which isn't doing any major graphical processing. Personally, I feel like that's plenty of time before having to plug into the USB-C port for power. No doubt that number could be greatly increased by turning the brightness down and the controller features like vibration and trigger reactions off.
You can also use the PlayStation Portal as a regular controller, but I don't know why you'd want to. The screen can't be turned off, so you're just playing remote-play with your TV turned on. Also, why use a bigger, heavier controller when chances are you have at least one DualSense kicking around anyway?
PSP in Name
As has been pointed out many times, PlayStation Portal shortens to PSP, which is an initialism shared by Sony's first dedicated handheld gaming device that came out way back in 2005. But the Portal is definitely not a shot across Nintendo's bow, because the Portal only plays games via Remote Play, so it’s not like you can play it on the go (there’s no version with a cellular connection) or without also owning a PlayStation 5. There is literally nothing else it can do. That seems like a bit of a bummer given the $200 price tag – I’d have liked to be able to watch Netflix or YouTube on the Portal, but all media functions are disabled on Sony Remote Play. The PlayStation Portal will only play games and let you navigate the PS5's menus, so without a PS5 at the ready, the Portal is a paperweight.
It’s also kind of bonkers that this thing doesn't have Bluetooth. If you want to listen to your games without everybody in the room hearing them along with you you're going to need either a wired headset, which sucks for 2023, or you’ll need one of Sony's proprietary PlayStation Link-compatible headsets or earbuds, which also sucks. Add to that suckiness the fact those earbuds and headset aren't even out yet.
But don't worry! The earbuds come out December 6. Oh, wait, but do worry, because they cost $200 on their own. Wait, actually, the next Pulse headset is $149, so that's a little bit of a savings… but that doesn’t come out until the end of February 2024. What the hell, Sony? At least this problem has an expiration date – unless you don’t intend to buy Sony headphones – but it’s going to be frustrating for early adopters. I really can't understand why Sony didn't include Bluetooth. If it's a cost-saving measure, it's a bizarre one given there's still some kind of chip in there broadcasting Sony's sound tech, so I don't think that's the case. Plus, Bluetooth is super cheap and is in everything.
It's made all the more frustrating by the fact the single worst part of the Portal is its built-in speakers. They sound flaccid and underpowered, with little in the way of audio range. I do appreciate they are stereo speakers, and in games that use stereo effects it's still noticeable. But otherwise, the sound is really underwhelming and at full volume, sounds blown-out. My phone's speaker sounds better (and I can pair my phone to my Bluetooth headset).
Portable Portal
Setting up the Portal is extremely easy. You just need to make sure your PS5 is set up for Remote Play first, then you power on the Portal, connect to Wi-Fi, wait for it to download the update and restart, then wait for it to apply the update and restart again, and then follow the prompts to pair it to your PlayStation 5. Okay yes, that sounds like a hassle now that I type it out, but it’s not like you can mess it up, and it’s a process you only need to do once. The other thing is that you do need to make sure your PlayStation 5 is in rest mode and not completely powered-down, or else it won’t turn on and connect when you pick up your Portal.
The first time I connected it took a few moments to find my PlayStation 5, but when it did it worked flawlessly. It's so cool to be able to use my PS5 in what is otherwise a completely normal way, but on a bright, beautiful, portable screen.
The first game I played was Marvel's Spider-Man 2, and my initial worry was some of the text would be too small to read, but the eight-inch screen proved to be just big enough to see everything, even the smaller text. I hadn't actually gotten around to playing Spider-Man 2 yet, and it turned out to be an awesome showcase for the Portal. The smaller screen obviously minimizes the scale of the earliest boss battle, but for being able to play while lying down on my couch? I'll take that trade.
I also played NHL '23 and found it incredibly fun on the small screen as well. I didn't have any issues with text or menus, although it is a little hard to see some of the action around the net on the eight-inch screen.
As Good as Your WiFi
If you've used Remote Play before, you know the single biggest bottleneck in performance is the quality of your WiFi signal. I have a decent WiFi router – yes, it’s the one provided by my ISP – and never once did the signal drop out while using the Portal in my living room. However, in both Spider-Man and NHL, there was a noticeable drop in framerate in moments where the action got really fast, albeit briefly. I noticed the same issue in Final Fantasy VII Remake during some of the busier battlers. Occasionally, I’d spot the resolution drop down for a tick or two, but again, that was only during the fastest and most-heated parts of the games.
The only time the stream really struggled was when I was downloading a game. I wanted to test the Portal's battery life against Astro's Playroom's awesome DualSense controller features, and went to re-add it to my library. Since my PS5 is connected wirelessly, the added bandwidth of a game download brought Remote Play to its knees, even losing connection once or twice before picking it back up again. Once the downloaded was completed, everything returned to normal.
Moving away from the router to my bedroom, where I have less-than-stellar WiFi coverage, the problem got pretty bad. It was no fault of the Portal, it was wholly because I haven’t set up enough access point to give it a good enough signal. At this point I had switched to playing Final Fantasy VII Remake and there were occasions when the streaming buffer was working so hard, the resolution drop made text completely unreadable. The moral of the story is that if you're planning on getting a PlayStation Portal, you should make sure your household WiFi coverage is in top form anywhere you’ll want to play it. Sony also recommends you have a 15Mbps or greater connection for best results, but the minimum requirement is 5Mbps.
After establishing the Portal works great in (most of) my house I packed it up and took it to Dunkin' Donuts, which, as a New Englander, I am required by law to visit at least once per month. I’d hoped to test its performance on public WiFi, but this was a total bust. Dunkin, like many chains, airports, libraries, hotels, and other locations offering guest WiFi, requires you to visit a website and acknowledge its terms of service before allowing you onto their network, and the Portal has no web browser to allow such an interaction. That's a huge bummer, because pretty much any place you'd want to use it outside your house is going to require that initial login page. This seems like something that could be handled in a future update, but for now, you're out of luck.
However, one of the locally owned coffee shops in my town has free WiFi with no such requirement, so I took the Portal in for a cup of coffee to see if it worked as advertised. Getting on their WiFi was easy, but connecting to my console back at home took long enough that I was worried it wasn't going to work. But once it did, it worked incredibly well. In fact, it worked almost as well as it does at my house, when both devices are on the same network.
This was the turning point for me, where I went from "well this is kind of neat," to "this is actually rad." There I was, playing FF7R from the PS5 in my house in a cafe across town and it was nearly indistinguishable from the experience at home. Again, that’s something that can certainly be done on your phone or tablet (and those are able to get past that login screen) but none of them feels as good to hold and play on as the Portal.
