It’s been a couple of years now since the PlayStation Portal came out, but despite spending a frankly ludicrous amount of time on my PS5 and, more recently, PS5 Pro, I’d never actually gone hands-on with a Portal until very recently.
I’ll happily admit that, while I had no issue with the idea of the Portal, it just wasn’t something I could see myself needing. I mostly game on a monitor in my home office (a gorgeous 4K Sony Inzone M9 II if you’re wondering), rather than on the main TV. That means I don’t really need a second-screen device, since I’m not hogging the TV if I play on my PS5 Pro.
For one thing, it means you’re no longer limited to Remote Play and the network strength of your home’s Wi-Fi – rather, it’s just about connection speeds and being able to support cloud streaming in bandwidth terms.
So, with a loan unit from PlayStation in hand, I’ve been testing out cloud streaming on the Portal for the past couple of weeks, and it’s been eye-opening. I first tried this on my PS5 when it was made available, and found it pretty high on latency, the point where I ditched it quickly.
Now, though, I am indeed impressed with what I’ve been playing. Where games used to feel sluggish to the point where those needing fast reactions felt sub-par, I now would pretty happily play almost anything on the handheld.
The screen, for one thing, has always been impressive (despite not being an OLED), and continues to hold up really well. It’s vivid and sharp, just as you’d hope, and colourful titles like Sword of the Sea look terrific.
That said, there are still hangups. I occasionally found that games wouldn’t start because the Portal was citing poor connection strength – but checking what my iPhone was pulling at the same time would confirm speeds over 500mb/s, far more than PlayStation’s recommended minimum for 1080p (15mp/s).
Similarly, there’s no escaping the fact that you do get lag spikes, seemingly without a clear cause every time, and these have a knock-on effect on latency for periods. When it’s stable, as it often is for long stretches, these fade into memory.
The real question for me is how this’ll hold up when I’m on far weaker connections, like those in hotels or hotspotting from my phone. I aim to keep testing this over the next few months on trips and holidays, to see how it fares.