Last week, Sony officially announced the PlayStation Portal, its new Remote Play handheld companion device for the PS5, priced at £199.99. While Sony unveiled most of the details then, it kept quiet on the release date, simply stating it was coming this year. Now, that has changed, with a November release date being announced.
The PlayStation Portal isn't a new PSP, or even a dedicated gaming handheld. Instead, it is Sony's first dedicated ‘Remote Play' device, offering users a large 8-inch display and a split controller design with full DualSense functionality, including upgraded haptics and trigger features, ensuring compatibility with all PS5 games.
As a Remote Play device, you will need a PS5 in your house in order to utilise this. Using Remote Play, you can stream your PS5 games over the home network to your PS Portal, so you'll also want to ensure you have a network setup that can support quality streaming from device to device. If you live in a house where your router struggles to deliver WiFi effectively to all rooms, then this product may not be for you.
The display is an 8-inch 1080p LCD display rather than OLED. You will still get to enjoy 60FPS gameplay though. For whatever reason, the PlayStation Portal does not support cloud game streaming through PlayStation Plus, so you'll only be able to play games you own and have installed locally on your PS5 console.
The PlayStation Portal will launch on the 15th of November in the UK, US, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Portugal. The device will launch in Canada and Japan at a slightly later date. When it does launch, it will be priced at $199.99 in the US and £199.99 here in the UK.
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KitGuru Says: The PlayStation Portal is a very limited device. If Sony made it cloud-capable, then it would potentially have a bigger market, although the company is only just beginning to scale up its cloud efforts to include PS5 titles, so perhaps this is something that can arrive through a software update at some point.