If you were expecting me to jump on the hate bandwagon for this thing, you're gonna end up sorely disappointed. I do have problems with the PlayStation portal, but I've been a believer in remote game streaming for as long as some of you have been alive, starting with the Nvidia Shield. No, not that one. The handheld one that everyone, including Nvidia, seems to have forgotten about. I played Tomb Raider 2013, start to finish on that thing, infant son and lap, without ever touching my keyboard and mouse. It was my portal to gaming at a time when I otherwise couldn't make time for it. So look, if you're not psyched for this thing, I get it. But I am, or at least I will be, if Sony has ironed out all the troubleshooting nonsense that has made this technology kind of inaccessible for the average gamer. Setup challenge begins now. Power. English. Does anyone know the wifi password? Thank you for the ortholinear keyboard, just kidding. I agree. Approve. Select a PS5. Allow connection to PS5. Settings, system, remote play, and turn on remote play. Settings, system. Oh, it was on. It was? Not hit X to connect. Oh. Wait. Oh, okay, it worked. Overall, not as smooth as it could have been. Not a huge fan of that tiny press X to continue indicator in the bottom left, but we're still completely set up and ready to game in just three and a half minutes. That's not bad. Now let's see how fast we can segue to our sponsor. Ugreen, their Black Friday sale is on now with up to 50% off products like the magnetic 10,000 milliamp hour battery bank. Oh my goodness, that's a lot. Check it out at the link below. I'm definitely picking up on a little bit of a delay, but Hollow Knight's a pretty unforgiving game as far as that goes, and this is not bad. What are we looking at? 150 milliseconds. 150 milliseconds, and that is complete chain? Yes. That is very usable. There's definitely some banding and blocking, particularly when things get really busy on screen and you've got smoke or lots of particle effects flying around, but the display looks great, super sharp, very usable. Don't judge the portal based on how I'm doing right now. I have only played like an hour and a bit of this game and the save is much deeper in than I thought. Visually, this is a super busy game with really lush environments. I am expecting it to be, oh, a lot less visual artifact-y than I was expecting. Once again, particle effects and smoke, gonna be a bit of a struggle, but anything reasonably close to you doesn't look bad at all. I'm also a little surprised at how okay the text looks, especially when the menu looked so bad when it first loaded up. Oh yeah, no, that seems fine now. There's no question the game is playable. Does it have a performance mode though? Favor performance, let's see how that feels. Oh yeah, that's more like it. This is 100% how I would play this. Oh, nice soundstage, where are these speakers? Oh, the top, top firing. Man, this one looks particularly okay. Maybe it helps that it's at night. Definitely managing to notice some visual anomalies with all these bright lights moving around on screen, kinda like confetti when you're running at a low bit rate. But the truth is, if I was just playing the game and not busy trying to evaluate the device, there's nothing about the visuals or the sound that would make me go, oh, this sucks, forget it. I think I'm getting ahead of myself a little though. Let's take a tour. From the front, it's as though you were playing a game on your DualSense controller, and a dimensional wizard came along and opened up an eight-inch portal right down the middle. And I consider that to be a really good thing. The DualSense is far and away my favorite PlayStation controller ever, and probably the best first-party design on the market right now. And the only thing that's really missing is the touchpad. Now, I'm not gonna sugarcoat this. The on-screen replacement for this kind of sucks, but I'm hoping that it can be fixed in software, and I'm pretty confident Sony's gonna get this figured out. What they can't fix in software is that the sticks are measurably smaller, but it's the kind of thing that I didn't notice until I went looking for it, and makes sense when you consider that this is a device that's likely to be stuffed into your backpack, say, maybe in this handy little screen-safe spot right here, lttstore.com. Even with the angle of the screen, I think it's fair to say that this is one of the most comfortable handheld gaming devices that we have ever seen. It's not light at 529 grams. It is noticeably heavier than its nearest competitor, the Logitech G Cloud, and it even weighs more than some full-blown handheld consoles, notably the Switch OLED, but it puts the user in a much wider, more ergonomic posture that, in my opinion, mostly offsets the weight, even during longer play sessions. But the real killer feature of the Portal is the price. Okay, okay, okay, okay, look. I know you could just throw your phone in a backbone and game on that at a fraction of the cost, but hear me out, guys, okay? You get a first-party-grade controller with adaptive triggers and haptic feedback. You get a decent eight-inch screen. You get a battery, speakers, Wi-Fi, packaging and shipping, a processor with accelerated video decode and some RAM and storage, obviously. This appears to be a Snapdragon 662 from early reports, but we don't have pricing for that, so let's use a Raspberry Pi Zero as a price proxy. You'll need an operating system that probably needed to be developed at some point, and somewhere in there, you've gotta find some margin for Sony's retail partners and, God willing, Sony themselves. So, look, I know $200 is a lot to ask for an accessory to a $500 device, but you know what else is $200? The DualSense Edge, and that's just a controller. So if we're not outraged about that, I don't see why we have a problem with this. And I get it, this product might not speak to you, and that's fine, but I think attacking its price is a poor use of our finite anger energy, especially when there are other places we could direct it that are much more valid. Back to our tour, then. The device charges and charges only through a bottom-mounted USB-C port, meaning that there's great ergonomics when you're playing with it, but no, your display, ethernet or Bluetooth dongles will not work, which isn't the main problem. The main problem is why would you need a Bluetooth dongle? Let me put it this way. You have multiple options for audio playback, the three and a half millimeter headphone jack, which is right next to the USB-C port, the top-firing stereo speakers, or the companion Pulse series headphones from Sony via PlayStation Link. I says pardon? Yeah, you heard me. In spite of its mobile-first design, the portal has no support for Bluetooth. Sony's justification for this is that PlayStation Link and their proprietary low-latency, lossless audio format are gonna deliver a better gaming experience than Bluetooth when they launch their Pulse Elite headset or Pulse Explore earbuds later this year. And that's fair enough. Even modern Bluetooth 5.X can struggle when streaming high-quality, real-time audio. But to not give me the option, if that's a drawback that I'm willing to accept, especially when the hardware is obviously in there, that's just insulting. Oh, how do I know the hardware's in there? Well, for one thing, I can't think of a single modern Wi-Fi chipset that doesn't also integrate Bluetooth. And for another, those Pulse headphones do support Bluetooth if you pair them to another device, like say, for example, a Nintendo Switch. So it's likely that Sony is just tweaking the encoding and could choose to operate in standard mode like Nintendo eventually did. My other big issue with it is battery life. Like the Logitech G Cloud, the portal is dead silent and stays cool to the touch. But the G Cloud managed over 11 hours of gaming on its 6,000 milliamp hour battery. The portal, four. I understand they had a price to hit, but that is huge. And the charge time is okay at least, but still, this compromise is the difference between this thing kicking around my house and I just grab it and game on it when I feel like it and me needing to remember to charge it after every session, then go get it when I actively wanna use it. Kinda like the DualSense. The last controversial cut was to wireless. Wi-Fi five? Really, Sony? I mean, the PS5 itself, which launched three years ago, has Wi-Fi six. However, this one might not be as big of a deal as you'd think. While gaming, we found that the portal was eating up about 10 to 14 megabits per second. So there's no way that you would saturate a Wi-Fi five connection, unless you were at the very limits of your router's range. And even if you were, Wi-Fi six would be pretty unlikely to help anyway, since that generational bump didn't come with any big improvements to range. Though, of course, it should be noted that all of this depends on your specific setup and the quality of your network, which actually doesn't need to be that high, I guess. 14 megabit? Let's talk about what that means for image quality, because that's a lot lower than I expected for 1080p60. As I alluded to earlier, you are going to notice some streaming compression while gaming on the portal, especially in the finer details of busy scenes, like, for example, the Sandman opening of Spider-Man 2. But the reality of it is that's gonna be the case with any wireless video streaming device, and we found that most of the time, it wasn't too distracting. One little tip is that we would strongly recommend setting your games to 60 FPS performance mode when using the portal. You're unlikely to notice the better visual fidelity on such a small screen, not to mention over a stream anyway. And the higher your frame rate, the lower your input latency, which is going to be doubly important if you expect to use the portal away from your house. Sony does support this use case, which is super cool because it kind of turns your PlayStation into a personal cloud gaming service that has no monthly subscription, but it is going to add anywhere from another 10 milliseconds of latency, best case scenario, to 50, 100 milliseconds, or even more depending on your distance from home. And that's even with a decent connection, and assuming you will actually be able to use it. You see, Sony in their infinite wisdom has opted not to include an internet browser on the portal, which means that as of this time, there is no way to authenticate with captive portal wireless networks, like the kind found in restaurants, hotels, or basically anywhere that isn't your friends or your mom's house. You could tether to your phone, I guess, but at least if you live in North America, that is only gonna be an option if you really hate money and also hate image quality. Now, our guess is that this was done to deter homebrew and jailbreaking, since browsers tend to be a point of ingress for these kinds of console hacks. But only time will tell if Sony's approach is going to work, and if it's going to be worth the outrage that this is causing amongst their customers. I gotta admit, if it can be jailbroken, I find that pretty exciting, and there already seems to be some work going on, though Herbarax here isn't being entirely realistic. No Switch emulator is gonna be running on this wimpy little SoC, but if this thing is just running Android and someone does manage to root it, nothing would prevent you from running Moonlight on it and playing PC games at desktop quality on this great screen with this great controller, if it is. On the subject of things you can't do with the Portal at the moment, PS Plus Premium Streaming. I know, WTF, right? I mean, you can stream from your own PlayStation, but not from Sony's PlayStation streaming service? Not even if it routes through your own PlayStation? In fairness, that would probably butcher the experience, but still, I think it says a lot about how low tier they had to go on the hardware to make this thing happen at this price. Coming back to good news, though, they didn't seem to cheap out on the screen. While we weren't able to run our test patterns for a full analysis, the screen looks vibrant to the eye and managed 493 nits peak brightness under real-world conditions, which is very similar to what we measured on the Logitech G Cloud Wireless. It runs at 1080p 60 hertz, meaning that under ideal conditions, it'll look noticeably sharper than the Steam Deck. And while it's an LCD, not an OLED, the glossy finish does help make blacks pop, and it looks pretty darn good. It's SDR, which is kind of a bummer, considering that Remote Play already has support for HDR on your PC, or your phone for that matter, which is another compelling argument for using a strap-on controller, if you don't mind the smaller screen. But I think we made it clear in our cost breakdown why a brighter HDR display probably wasn't in the cards and wouldn't have helped battery life either. Now, before it was announced, there were rumors that the Portal would be more of a standalone device, like the PlayStation Vita, rather than a device dedicated to streaming games from the PlayStation 5 you already own. And I can see why people were excited for that. But now that it's in our hands, we love how easy it is to use, and I feel like the simplicity is one of the Portal's greatest strengths. I mean, I've made my issues with it clear at this point, but I feel like it's a lot like the PSVR, too. It's great tech at a fair price. That is, as long as you're willing to enter a monogamous relationship with Sony, or wait for community tinkerers to strip out the limitations. As it is today, though, we can't rely on that. But if you've already bought into the PS5 ecosystem, and you share a TV with other people in your house, the Portal gives more value to the console you already own. Value that I would argue is well worth the cost of admission. My only worry is whether the Portal will continue to give value beyond the PS5. See, it's hard to predict if the PlayStation 6, for example, will be able to stream to the Portal, since Sony's track record with backwards and forwards compatibility is complicated, to say the least. Ha ha ha ha! What's not complicated is where you can go to buy one. We're gonna have links to where to buy the PlayStation Portal, and also a link to our sponsor. Ugreen, ah, Black Friday, the time when Americans have traditionally upgraded their charging solutions. 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If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out our review of the Steam Deck OLED. It's more than double the price, but given it has a full fat gaming PC strapped to the back of it, I would argue that it's more than double the fun as well.
