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.
Honestly, this was already a pretty bad piece of e-waste but with no Bluetooth so you have to buy another piece of proprietary piece of e-waste is just egregious BS.
This is such a bizzare narrow product.
Surely they must want it to fail? They must have learned nothing from the PSV. The PSV had a lot of great things, but had its problems. Seems like they thought, “How can we make a worse version of the PSV?”
At least the Vita played games.
And funnily enough. Could also do remote play. I remember playing destiny at work on my vita via wifi. God the psv was great.
It’s almost like they want to make absolutely sure that it will fail
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.
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.
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.
Hardcore PlayStation fans that don’t mind spending 500 bucks on a dumb terminal and a set of wireless headphones that won’t work with anything else.
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.
This must cost almost nothing for them to produce. This thing is gonna fail hard. Only way they can make anything off of this is with a big profit margin.
I imagine it’s pretty cheap to produce with the biggest costs going to the controller and LCD screen since it’s literally a dumb terminal with no Bluetooth or streaming service capability.
Really a pointless piece of silicon if you ask me.
I’m not sure I understand part of this. The regular pulse 3d headset doesn’t support Bluetooth in the first place - even to use it with PS5 you have to plug in a USB dongle.
the new headset and buds use “playstation link”, and are the first to do so. but they also said 3rd party manufacturers could implement it in future devices as well.
My take is that it’s complete BS to release a “portable gaming handheld” without Bluetooth support out of the box.
Most of us already have wireless headphones for our mobile devices and making gamers buy proprietary headphones/earbuds that cost nearly as the device, and let’s be honest only this device because no other device is going to use this PlayStation link protocol, is also complete BS and I honestly think it’s anti-consumer.
portable gaming handheld
But it’s not a portable gaming handheld, is a PS5 controller with a screen. Think of it as the Wii U controller. You need a PS5 console and stay close to that console, outside the PS5 range is completely useless since the PlayStation Portal does not run games.
Hence the quotes. The only thing that it that it’s supposed to work with any connection as long as the PS5 is connected to the Internet with their remote play capability, which it’s like Steam Link, which unless you have a symetric home Internet, isn’t exactly great.
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.
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.
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.
Mutahar really ripped into this one.
It’s a wierd play by Sony for sure.
Now you’re thinking with portals!
