Probably Not.

by Joe

Stubbs made me do it

What’s good fellow Sony Ponies? It is I: Joe, with a righteous and good start to this New Year: Hypocrisy. Why? I’ve already written guides on setting up PS5 remote play on the Steam Deck and the RP5 and argued that they were better options than Sony’s official offering.

The PlayStation Portal stands infamously as one of the community’s most goofed-on handhelds and will continue to be after this article. Alas…there’s one issue here: I bought one anyway, and I have a lot to say about it.

What Does It Do?

“Wait. Now there’s two of them”

The PS Portal has 2 functions: PS5 remote play and (as of the most recent update) PlayStation cloud streaming. And that’s it. It’s a pretty light device overall and is exactly how it looks: an 8” tablet with half of a DualSense controller on each side. It is truly a handheld of all time.

Functionally, you have a relatively bare interface that you operate to turn on your PS5 from any location and stream away as well as some basic settings on the console. The handheld displays a max resolution of 1080p, which is totally fine if you consider the bitrate.

You have the option for wired headphones, wireless headphones connected to your PS5 (at home only), or shilling another $200 for some wireless buds. Wow. So many things.

The controllers on the side are almost one-to-one representations of a DualSense cut-in-half… with some caveats. So yes, haptics and adaptive triggers are retained here and the buttons and ergonomics are basically the same. The analog sticks also have a full range motion but are slightly smaller than the actual DualSense controller.

So as you can see, this is very exciting stuff and I’m sure you will bring it up the next time you have dinner with your significant other’s parents. There are also buttons for…you guessed it: Power, volume, and microphone (because that was necessary in the first place).

What Does it NOT Do?

Anything else. And the reason why other devices seem more appealing on the surface. One big one is the lack of regular Bluetooth audio, making your existing wireless headphones of choice useless. I hypothesize it’s like this because of Bluetooth latency paired with lag inherently caused by Wi-Fi. You might ask at this point “How come Chiaki and PS Play seemed to figure it all out?” And that’s a very fair question…

Anyway, the screen is a pretty standard 8” IPS screen that won’t take advantage of high frame rates or HDR. Since there are no native apps chugging at the GPU, there’s also no onboard cooling. So yeah, It’s a pretty bare-bones experience. To be fair though it was never advertised as anything more than a remote player for your PS5, But the greater cause of concern is that initial $200 price of entry (or $220 for the 30th Anniversary edition. Oops.)

What Does it NOT Do Well?

Changing up the order here, please just roll with it.

Rolling right off of what the console doesn’t do, It actually has a direct impact on what it ultimately doesn’t do well (shocking). To start with the screen. Like all cheap IPS screens, this one comes with a lot of ghosting. It’s already bad enough that most of our games are TAA-smeared grossness, but add low resolution and bit rate to that and you get a pretty smearing mess. It’s tolerable, but just kind of sucks.

There’s also noticeable audio lag. This one I actually can explain by spoiling what the handheld does well: in an ideal situation it is nearly latency-free visually. When the handheld was released it was initially plagued with audio issues that crackled in and out if there was a minor disturbance visually. However, further updates patch the audio so that it works perfectly, but with a noticeable lag.

If any of you emulating folks are familiar with audio stretching, this will make sense since all it does is just buffer the audio so that it comes out as clear. The audio latency also reflects wired headphones as well and the only way to get around it is to hook up a wireless headset to your PS5, which isn’t exactly a $200 selling point. There might also be a case to be made here about different Wi-Fi types that the handheld can handle, but I have a limited use case in this sense.

What Does it Do Well?

Sometimes in life, you just take a dive and try something even though you hate it on the surface. You never know when you feel like a $200 ($220) investment might be worth it. This isn’t such a use case, but I also can bring myself to sell this thing. Regardless of all the negatives going on here, This is the most comfortable way to play PS5 games remotely. Full stop. The lack of any real internals paired with having actual controllers on the sides makes this both a light and ergonomically comfortable experience.

It might not be the best looking at times, and the audio stinks, but I’m also a dad. A married dad. A married dad who has a family that gets extremely bored of watching him grind away at RPGs on the shared living room TV. I just want my freedom back, and this device gives me something close to an uncompromised experience. Call me an idiot, but I like the triggers and haptics using the DualSense. I think they are very fun, and they make me feel good.

Huh. Portal. I get it.

The software experience might be simple, but it’s very reliable and very snappy with no menus to sift through other than the PlayStations. It feels pretty well thought out for what it does. The snappiness is paired well with virtually no input latency. Now mind you, it is still there. But it actually works a lot better than the third-party counterparts, and I will take that any day. However, 30 fps titles still feel like a slog.

For context, my Internet speed is 300MB/s and I have my PS5 hardwired to my router with a standard, 1000MB rated ethernet cable. I’m generally not far from the router when in play. Results WILL vary depending on your configuration.

Conclusion

In 2025…this feels right. It could be better, and it SHOULD be better for $200. Maybe in the future, you’ll see my device pop up on the Discord sales section. But for now, I’m enjoying Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (still) on my overpriced tablet with controllers on the side.

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