Sony has officially unveiled the PlayStation Portal, and as a cloud-exclusive Remote Play handheld device, it’s obviously got a few caveats attached. The fact that it can’t play native games – or any native media – is, of course, one of them, while it’s also been confirmed that even the cloud library of PlayStation Plus Premium won’t be supported.
In addition, it’s also been confirmed that the PlayStation Portal won’t have Bluetooth. As reported by The Verge, that means users won’t be able to pair the PS5’s Pulse 3D wireless headset with the handheld device. The newly-revealed Pulse Elite headset and Pulse Explorer earbuds will be supported, but you’ll have to connect them using Remote Play. If you want to use them on a PS5, you’ll have to do so via a USB adapter.
They’ve intentionally left out everything that could expand the potential user base for this. It’s like Sony wants it to be as niche as possible.
This is such a bizzare narrow product.
It’s almost like they want to make absolutely sure that it will fail
Who is the target audience for this thing? I really don’t see the market for it.
Who is the target audience for this thing?
Clueless parents
"There you go son, the Nintendo Plaything that you wanted! "
That is a great argument for knock-off movies and shitty licensed games because they’re cheap. You’d have to be living a pretty comfortable life to cluelessly buy a console.
Sony has FOMO in regards to the handheld market and is hoping that their half baked garbage will net them some market share.
They looked at the Vita and thought that the time of handhelds has ended. Only for 3DS jumping up after a rocky first years , the Switch released in fiery success and the Steam Deck even introduced mobile PC gaming.
battery life will be comparable to the DualSense controller, which would mean roughly 8-9 hours
Never has my DualSense controller’s battery lasted 8-9 hours, especially when haptic feedback is enabled.
3-4 is more like it. And it never wants to charge on usb on my PC for some reason.
That’s too bad. I use a cradle charger with room for two controllers, so I always have one in standby.
EDIT
The setup works very well.
I honestly don’t get what they’re thinking. They make phones. They making gaming equipment. Why don’t they integrate those together like they did with the Xperia Play? I don’t necessarily mean taking another kick at that can (but yes, they should take another kick at that can) but why not work with what they’re good at? Like they work with Backbone to make a Playstation branded version of it – but it runs on iPhones only!
It seems so obvious - make an Xperia/PSP branded gaming-grade phone, offer a first-party Backbone-like controller, sell a Playstation Portal screen-and-wifi-only device that also docks into that Backbone-like controller, etc. The only real problem is Google’s monopolistic rules against letting hardware companies offer alternate stores on PlayStore-based devices, or they could have a Playstation Android Store focused on gamepad-based games that are specifically targeting their gaming Android devices.
Bring back PSP as an Sony+Android gaming brand.
It’s pretty absurd, there’s no reason Sony products shouldn’t work with themselves. The Sony Linkbuds would be a great use case for the Portal but apparently not.
Well Bluetooth would likely add a bit more latency, so that makes sense when you think about it.
At least it has a headphone jack.
I actually likely would have bought this if it had bluetooth. remote play on my laptop is cumbersome if im sitting on the couch, but if I can’t use my airpods then I’m out. i’ve got some sennheisers I could use with the 3.5mm jack but over ear headphones get uncomfortable quickly to me.
Now you’re thinking with portals!
