It sounds foolproof when I sum it up like that, but booting up the Portal and connecting (the only thing it does when you turn it on) is a very \u201cyour mileage may vary\u201d moment. It may work fine. It may not work at all. It may require some tinkering with your home network settings. I\u2019ve been lurking in the r\/PlayStationPortal subreddit to get a gist of the vibe from its community, and amid the troubleshooting help and people posting their W\u2019s about how great their Portal works even on a roadtrip you occasionally see some massive frustration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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For my home testing, my PS5 is connected via ethernet and I have gigabit internet over a mesh Wi-Fi network with three Google Nest Wifi Pro routers. Even with all of that, there are of course spots in my home where connectivity can get a little dicey. Sometimes, for what seems in the moment unexplainable, a game will freeze up and skip whole seconds of gameplay. I never quite know if it\u2019s because another device on my network is suddenly soaking up bandwidth, or there\u2019s more congestion from my ISP in the neighborhood, or maybe it\u2019s just a strange anomaly. You never really know why, but you have to live with the reality that every once in a while you might have your swings in Spider-Man 2<\/em> or your axe throws in God of War Ragnar\u00f6k<\/em> disrupted. It may test your patience at times, but it\u2019s the trade-off of relying on Wi-Fi in exchange for not taking up the family TV or bringing your game into a different room.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
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In this photo we were streaming over 30 miles away from my PlayStation 5, and it worked very well. That was, until we accidentally turned off the console while remote \u2014 rendering the Portal useless until I returned home.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
This is where one of the PlayStation Portal\u2019s biggest oversights can\u2019t help but make you wonder if things could be better. The Portal only supports Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), which has been around since 2014. It has more than enough bandwidth for Sony\u2019s listed minimum requirement of 5Mbps download and upload speeds and even well beyond the recommended speed of 15Mbps, but why does a new device released in late 2023 (one that relies on Wi-Fi, mind you) not ship with a Wi-Fi 6 or 6E radio? While not all homes have Wi-Fi 6E routers, the ones that do should be able to play their Portals on the less congested 6Ghz band. It\u2019s one of the Portal\u2019s many baffling oversights, especially since Wi-Fi 7 devices are rounding the corner.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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This is a very \u201cYMMV\u201d device<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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But the Portal\u2019s illogical quirks go well beyond its Wi-Fi spec shortcomings. This thing has an Airplane Mode. Why? It\u2019s a paperweight without Wi-Fi. It doesn\u2019t play any games or media off of local storage \u2014 it doesn\u2019t even tell you <\/em>how much internal storage it has \u2014 and it doesn\u2019t stream any content that isn\u2019t beamed to it from your PS5. It also lacks an auto-brightness adjustment, doesn\u2019t come with any protective case (the only options out there are from third parties), and only supports one user login at a time. Do you share your PS5 with another person or have multiple accounts within your family? If you plan to share the PlayStation Portal as well then be prepared to manually log out and log back in (including with 2FA if you have it activated \u2014 which you should) on it every single time someone else wants a turn.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
All of these quirks and shortcomings make the Portal feel like a half-measure, or the bones of a bigger project that got its funding cut part way through development. Though perhaps nothing feels as egregious as the omission of Bluetooth audio. The Portal thankfully has a 3.5mm headphone jack, but if you want wireless your only option is Sony\u2019s new proprietary PlayStation Link audio devices \u2014 which carry premium prices while lacking premium features like active noise cancellation. Of the two headphones announced thus far, only the $199.99 Pulse Explore earbuds have come out yet (and are still hard to find in stock). The $149.99 Pulse Elite headset isn\u2019t due out until late February.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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If you can live with the quirks, this is a cozy way to play some PS5 games.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
Sony\u2019s Pulse Explore earbuds work well on the Portal, and yes, their proprietary PlayStation Link connection yields noticeably less latency than using the same earbuds in Bluetooth mode on another device with Remote Play. But in no way does that justify omitting Bluetooth entirely from the Portal. Bluetooth can be slow and inefficient but it performs well enough and it\u2019s a convenient feature that should be present on this device that\u2019s all about convenience and simplicity. Asking your customers to spend yet another $150 to $200 just to use wireless audio on your $200 remote player is pretty lousy \u2014 especially since the more expensive (and noise-canceling) Sony InZone H9 wireless headset some PS5 diehards may already own can\u2019t even be used via its USB dongle. The saving grace of the Portal in regards to audio are its built-in speakers that don\u2019t sound too tinny and the fact that you can always fall back to wired audio (which circumvents any latency anyway).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Despite all these frustrating quirks, the Portal delivers a nice all-in-one experience. You can have a higher quality Remote Play experience on an iPad or laptop with much larger screens, and you can have a more portable experience with a collapsible phone controller like the BackBone One, but all of those solutions are clunkier. Nothing is quite as simple as picking up the Portal and turning it on.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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1\/2<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t have Bluetooth but it has an entire button dedicated solely to PlayStation Link headphone pairing.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n\n
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1\/2<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t have Bluetooth but it has an entire button dedicated solely to PlayStation Link headphone pairing.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
Many Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally owners have found ways to use Remote Play with free software like Chiaki, but you still have to put in a bit of legwork and tinkering to get it set up. I\u2019ve used it on my original Deck, and it\u2019s mostly fine \u2014 successfully mimicking even the DualSense touchpad and share button thanks to community-made downloadable button layouts \u2014 but you\u2019re just never going to have all those DualSense haptics (if you care).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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The PlayStation Portal shortcuts the initial setup labor and confusion of Remote Play to give you a somewhat turnkey, streamlined solution. It can be handy alongside your PS5 if you\u2019re a parent or a busy person looking to squeeze in short game sessions despite someone else using the TV, or if you want to add a level of comfort to your gaming by allowing you to chill in bed while playing. But all the caveats and hangups of Remote Play are still here.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Some of the various ways you can stream your PS5 via Remote Play.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
My biggest recommendation for people considering a Portal is to first connect your PS5 via ethernet (seriously, Wi-Fi on both ends of this equation ain\u2019t gonna be a good time), and test out the PS Remote Play app using your home Wi-Fi on your laptop, tablet, or phone. If it performs well enough to your liking, especially for the kinds of games you like to play, then a Portal may make some sense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Sony\u2019s first attempt at a handheld since the PlayStation Vita may be a strange, limited device that only serves one purpose but it serves that purpose well if your home Wi-Fi isn\u2019t plagued with gremlins. Hopefully, Sony is testing the waters of what\u2019s to come more than simply releasing a half-baked product. There seems to be a demand (at least for now), as Portals are heavily backordered. I\u2019m cool with nerdy niches and single-use devices when they\u2019re good, and overall I\u2019ve enjoyed the Portal despite its numerous flaws. But it mostly makes me long for a return of a true portable PlayStation handheld, which I hope Sony is working on for the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto \/ The Verge<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] Sony is often at its best when it\u2019s at its weirdest, like making donut-shaped earbuds that are actually super comfy or a speaker and lamp combo that totally looks like a bong for some reason. But when it comes to the PlayStation Portal, the weirdness isn\u2019t just in the design, it\u2019s at the core …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16965,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16964"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}