Sony’s PlayStation Portal gives a confusing first impression
By Antonio G. Di Benedetto, a writer covering tech deals and The Verge’s Deals newsletter, buying guides, and gift guides. Previously, he spent 15 years in the photography industry.
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Sony’s new PlayStation Portal that launches November 15th is a $199.99 device that does just one thing: it streams games via Wi-Fi off of your home PlayStation 5, requiring that you already own Sony’s pricey console.
It doesn’t do any kind of cloud streaming like Nvidia’s Geforce Now or Sony’s own PlayStation Plus Premium subscription, and it can’t run anything locally (not even YouTube or Netflix). The Portal is purpose-built to use a singular feature Sony first debuted with the PS3 and PSP back in 2006 that’s also widely available on other devices you may already own, making me wonder: why does this exist? After spending a couple of days with it, I’m still not sure.
The Portal hardware is essentially what you’d get after sticking an eight-inch LCD between two halves of a standard DualSense controller. The laminated screen has a resolution of 1080p and maximum refresh of 60Hz — perfectly adequate for a display of this size. It supports Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), has a 4,370mAh nonremovable battery that charges via USB-C, top-firing stereo speakers, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and it connects with Sony’s new PlayStation Link-enabled headphones for lossless audio. (The Portal does not offer Bluetooth connectivity.) These specs aren’t anything particularly special, but you have to remember it’s the PS5 doing all the heavy lifting here.
As far as its build, if you’ve ever held a DualSense controller before, you’ll have a sense of what holding the Portal is
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