The PlayStation Portal is a fine device for a bizarrely narrow audience

polygon.com:

It’s been over 10 years since PlayStation made a handheld gaming console. Back in May, when news broke that a new handheld was on the way, Vita junkies cheered from their forgotten graves, celebrating the potential to play their favorite PlayStation games on the go.

And at first glance, you might think that the PlayStation Portal is the second coming of the Vita. But you’d be very wrong in that assessment. It is, in fact, just a device for playing games over PlayStation’s Remote Play feature. Exclusively. That’s it. That’s all it does. And it’s pretty good at doing that one thing. But so are a lot of devices, at this point! So we’re kinda left wondering why the PlayStation Portal even exists.

In case you’re unfamiliar, Remote Play allows you to connect to your PlayStation 5 on a mobile phone or browser, letting you control the games you already own on just about anything with an internet connection. Which sounds pretty dreamy when you put it like that.

The hitch with Remote Play is understanding its limitations. Because it relies on a strong internet connection, to have a decent experience with most games, you really need to be on the same WiFi network. You could, in a pinch, connect to Remote Play across the country to, say, browse an in-game shop to buy a time-limited item or to play a heavily down-rezzed turn-based strategy game — but otherwise, you really need to be right there.

The PlayStation Portal is designed to make the Remote Play experience as seamless as possible. It has its own 1080p screen, attached to what looks like a DualSense controller split down the middle. In many ways, it appears to be aping the form factor of the Switch (though the controller halves aren’t removable). But, unlike the Switch, you