Sony PlayStation Portal Review!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody it's Norm from tested and well it's handheld season really isn't it last week I reviewed the upcoming valve steam deck OLED and coming out this week something I've been using since this past Thursday is Sony's Playstation portal uh this is a kind of controversial handheld that they announc at the beginning of the year um and today we'll talk about what it is what it isn't and how it performs as a remote Play device cuz that's what this $200 uh handheld is it's not like Nintendo switch it's not like a steam deck it's kind of more like the Logitech g-cloud it is a streaming device for playing games off of your PlayStation 5 Remote Play of course has been a uh service assist system that's been around since the PS3 it's fairly robust and um people enjoy it with all sorts of different devices but basically you're uh able to over any kind of Wi-Fi or even sell your connection uh play games off of your console on a uh separate device so whether it's a SmartPhone a tablet or using applications like chiaki for deck or Ps play uh you can actually play your PS5 and PS4 games um while not sitting in front of your TV uh there are a variety of you know mounts that you can get for like the Dual sense controller for under $15 uh or you can buy even cheap Alternatives like stadia's controller for about you know 20 to $25 on eBay that then allow you to plug in uh over like this USBC connection to a new iPhone 15 or something but the PlayStation portal is all the that experience in a now first party Sony released handheld and looking at it let's take a look at the hardware itself first it's a large 8 in LCD screen kind of bouncing onto uh what looks like a dual sense controller split in two so ergonomically that's one of the big advantages of the PlayStation portal it feels very much like a holding a dual sense controller on the left and right side uh the weight of course is more this comes in at 530 G so uh less than that of a steam deck less than that of maybe two dual sense controllers and more than a Nintendo switch uh OLED model for example uh but spread across the weight I found this to be really comfortable to hold just that familiar uh feel of a dual sense controller even that same texture on the back your tiny you know PlayStation uh button logos on the back and all the buttons and everything all the bus buttons felt uh and responded very familiarly uh big difference though is that there's some difference in terms of placement your PlayStation button is on the left side here there's a mute button on the right side that illuminates uh for your microphone and the there's no touch uh touchpads so like your dual sense has that touchpad and a little speaker here uh here you have the speaker at the top that plays your full game sounds um and you would use an onscreen uh indicator on the left and right side these rectangles with your thumbs uh to replace the touchpad uh the thumb sticks also are slightly different so something I noticed when I went in for a preview of the PlayStation portal was that the thumb scks were smaller than that of your dual sense or dual sense Edge controller and my assumption was that it would be the same thumb sticks actually as the psvr2 controller those are smaller but it's not that either it's some somewhere in between so the thumb stick on the PlayStation portal a little bit bigger than what's on the psvr2 and a little bit smaller than what's on the Dual sense and dual sense Edge controllers but playing games for long periods of time my thumbs really couldn't tell the difference um let's flip this on so you can see what that process is like so as you boot it up it says to unlock press the PS button there's no locking code you can't actually set a locking code or anything thing um but you press this and you see the circular portal so this has already been paired with my PlayStation uh and it says ready to play so it's a pretty fast handshake that's doing uh right now and I'm of course in this is the best case demo scenarios so I'm at home uh my PlayStation 5 is connected over ethernet to my wireless network uh and that is then send connected over uh 80211 AC so Wi-Fi 5 uh to the PlayStation portal it's not 8021 8X not Wi-Fi 6E and to be honest Remote Play would tap into those bandwidth uh uh limits anyway the minimum uh bandwidth requirement if you're tethering this to your smartphone for example uh which I did try uh is 5 megabits per second and it goes up to so says 15 megabits per second um and compared to the visual quality of remote play on a phone and tablet it's very similar the largest screen actually I think works to both its benefit and detriment it's a 1080 1080p screen here up to 60 frames per second and at the best case scenario I mean it looks really nice as we'll see and as we jump into a game um but uh any of the compression artifacts that are just a byproduct of it being compressed video are more noticeable here and Sony says that they haven't changed any of the remote play backend system to allow for higher uh bandwidth connections and in fact with remote play on PS5 there's no way to adjust any of those settings it will go automatically to 1080 if it feels like the connection is strong enough it feels like it's not if you're only at that 5 megabits per second it'll go down to 720 and 720 rendered here on this LCD it's pretty chunky it's pretty clunky it's I would say it's barely playable you really want to have this on a strongish Wi-Fi connection not just tether to to your phone now uh in terms of latency that was one of the things that we really want to compare and we're curious about on the PlayStation portal uh Sony says that this is a best case remote place scenario because the Dual sense controllers are physically hardwired to this whole system it's essentially an Android system let's be honest here and so I was curious how this would compare to using uh remote play on my phone with a Bluetooth dual sense connection uh versus like a tethered USB controller or even playing on the steam deck using uh chiaki for deck and doing side-by side comparisons on the menu you know seeing how responsive uh these controls felt it was nearly indistinguishable honestly I couldn't tell any discernable benefits of having this being a a wire connection over a wired USB controller or even over a Bluetooth connected dual sense controller it felt almost EX exactly the same uh the other type of latency that is more noticeable though is screen latency of course it's sending that compressed video signal over either your local network or over the cloud then back to the PlayStation portal and comparing the screen response time on these Remote Play devices compared to the HDMI connected TV the system and the setup that actually performed the best was the Remote Play app on my I iPhone connected over Wi-Fi 6 and using a Bluetooth controller uh looking at the side bys side comparisons and going frame by frame on a cutscene to see when the cut scene would switch uh on these local devices it was actually about a frame slower on both the PlayStation portal and on the steam deck than on the uh iPhone using the Remote Play app so not actually I think the optimal uh the best case scenario with this connection here although that one frame difference was barely noticeable it's only unless uh you go and and and do a direct comparison between all these devices do you actually notice that difference something that was more noticeable I found was compression in the video being sent across so I played the a bunch of Spider-Man 2 uh just on the PlayStation portal and it's a game where there's you know a lot of fast motion you're swinging through cities you're you know panning around there's a lot of fast action and where 60 frames per second 1080p does benefit um and make the game very playable but I did start noticing if you're looking at even texture detail or just some that geometry in the distance uh there's that Telltale blocks of uh telltale signs of the blocky video compression both motion compression and even when scenes are pretty still and you're doing like a slope pan for example uh you're going to see in high detail parts of the scene uh just that blockiness of the h265 video compression was pretty noticeable when I booted up for example astrobot and scenes that just have tons of you know grass detail and texture detail and near and far objects panning around definitely could tell that this was a compressed video image not something running locally um that's the the case across all remote play experiences uh but when you're playing this on a larger 8in screen like this I found that even more noticeable than playing on a smaller phone for example and I wish that Sony did more on the back end to allow for higher bit rate streaming or even customization for streaming quality on the portal because otherwise this is a pretty Bare Bones experience I mean other than the touch screen here we can tap to see your two touchpad analoges you can pull in the the menu from the side and there's not a ton you can do you can very easily disconnect uh from your PS5 you can connect to the PlayStation explore earbuds or the upcoming Elite headphones using this new 2.4 GHz PS link connection there's the brightness slider of course and interestingly enough an airplane mode that immediately disconnects you from the gameplay and disconnects the headphones as well and in the settings menu aside from connecting to to your Wi-Fi network um and few bits of system information things like you know the duration uh how long the idle period before going into rest mode so not a lot you can do uh you can turn off the uh lights on the side the blue lights on the touch uh the light bar here on the Dual sense controllers or the mute button uh or you can turn down the haptics the vibration intensity or that dual sense trigger effect hap that might save you a little bit of battery life but I mean if the point of this is to have those dual sense controllers that ergonomics I want to have that at Max uh Max response and Max uh haptic feedback battery life was the other big question with the PlayStation portal and Playstation the ps5s accessories famously don't have a ton of great battery life the Dual sense controller lasts you know between six and 7 hours dual sense Edge uh less than half of that and the PlayStation portal I did two battery rundown tests one just playing Spider-Man 2 normally pick it up for 30 minutes at a time set it back down change my brightness based on my ambient brightness and over the course of two days got about 4 and a half hours of Total play time on the PlayStation portals less than I had hoped or anticipated certainly enough to go through multiple play sessions uh but I did myself then plugging this into USBC once it hit you know near zero doing a straightforward battery rundown test using a medium brightness and turning off the haptics on the Dual sense controller you know having a rubber band that's to have it running non-stop got about 5 and 1 half hours of battery live streaming from the PS5 and to charge this it comes with a USBC cable doesn't come with a wall wart it expects you to plug this into your PS5 to charge it takes 2 and 1/2 hours to charge this fully and using a dedicated 45 watt wall wart uh took 105 minutes well under that 2 and a half hour charge time to go from zero to 100% and in fact with that 45 watt W War uh with hour of charge you can get up to 65% charge from zero so that's not too long for recharging and sufficient for sitting in your couch sitting your bed for bedtime playing this of course this is not really a divice you'd be playing on a car ride over you know your tether to your phone Cellular Connection or plane ride either that that Wi-Fi just won't work this is for you know playing in a hotel room if you're traveling uh or one of the best scenarios for this is you know at home if you have kids like I do and they're they want to use the TV then sure they can watch the TV and then I can send the couch using the portal and stream directly from the PlayStation 5 and that's really the ideal scenario for this this is for households where you're sharing your main TV or you just want the versatility of playing that your PS5 game in different rooms in your house in your office in your bed uh on your couch in a different you know ergonomic setting and ergonomically I've really dug this I think they had a nice balance between the weight the weight distribution and the feel of these controllers uh I just wish that the image quality was a little better on this I'm not even bummed out that they use an LCD you you know it's just streaming video so the video quality on like the OLED steam deck or an OLED iPhone is nicer the blacks are darker but you're not getting true HDR uh with that video playback and here I like the brightness I like the the quality of this LCD the color representation I just wish those compression artifacts weren't there maybe that's something that can they can change with a future software update uh including Maybe allowing you to tap into ps+ premiums Cloud streaming uh but as of right now it's pretty Bare Bones I wouldn't say a compromised gaming experience but a very straightforward No Frills PlayStation gaming experience people who buy this hopefully know what they're getting into you know it's there's a lot of misinformation about whether you can play this at home or outside someone else's home yeah sure you can connect this as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection um without a Wi-Fi connection there's nothing you can do on this and that's where there might be some confusion I think this holiday season I mean looking at the box here for the portal there's not a ton of information it should say I think you know very clearly this needs a PS5 the only indication is in the bottom corner here where it says required with icon for a Wi-Fi and an icon for the PlayStation 5 and the Texas PlayStation console sold separately um it really needs I think Sony really needs to make clear that this is not a device that you can play games on by itself that it's PlayStation 5 required and big bold text and that's just not here in the Box unfortunately um but for people who are excited about it I think they know what they're getting into and what they'll be getting is a best case scenario Remote Play experience now that's not to say that it can't be improved I think there's still plenty of room for Improvement on this um whether it's with maybe a big better screen maybe uh better controls morein to the PS Edge controller or just software uh improvements on the back end for remote play allowing for you to customize your settings allowing for higher bit rate all these things that are just not available right now um so I hesitate to recommend this based on updates and upgrades that may or may not be coming in the future and honestly there are a lot of options out there right now if you have a PS5 you want to try out Remote Play just to see if it's right for you you know pick up a $15 phone dock or if you want to see you know for example the Logitech g-cloud that allows you do more than just PlayStation streaming but you can also do remote play on that as well if you have questions about the PlayStation portal about the PS link system and the PlayStation explore earbuds also 00 uh please post them in the comments below otherwise thank you so much for watching I'm Norm from tested and I'll see you next time byehey everybody it's Norm from tested and well it's handheld season really isn't it last week I reviewed the upcoming valve steam deck OLED and coming out this week something I've been using since this past Thursday is Sony's Playstation portal uh this is a kind of controversial handheld that they announc at the beginning of the year um and today we'll talk about what it is what it isn't and how it performs as a remote Play device cuz that's what this $200 uh handheld is it's not like Nintendo switch it's not like a steam deck it's kind of more like the Logitech g-cloud it is a streaming device for playing games off of your PlayStation 5 Remote Play of course has been a uh service assist system that's been around since the PS3 it's fairly robust and um people enjoy it with all sorts of different devices but basically you're uh able to over any kind of Wi-Fi or even sell your connection uh play games off of your console on a uh separate device so whether it's a SmartPhone a tablet or using applications like chiaki for deck or Ps play uh you can actually play your PS5 and PS4 games um while not sitting in front of your TV uh there are a variety of you know mounts that you can get for like the Dual sense controller for under $15 uh or you can buy even cheap Alternatives like stadia's controller for about you know 20 to $25 on eBay that then allow you to plug in uh over like this USBC connection to a new iPhone 15 or something but the PlayStation portal is all the that experience in a now first party Sony released handheld and looking at it let's take a look at the hardware itself first it's a large 8 in LCD screen kind of bouncing onto uh what looks like a dual sense controller split in two so ergonomically that's one of the big advantages of the PlayStation portal it feels very much like a holding a dual sense controller on the left and right side uh the weight of course is more this comes in at 530 G so uh less than that of a steam deck less than that of maybe two dual sense controllers and more than a Nintendo switch uh OLED model for example uh but spread across the weight I found this to be really comfortable to hold just that familiar uh feel of a dual sense controller even that same texture on the back your tiny you know PlayStation uh button logos on the back and all the buttons and everything all the bus buttons felt uh and responded very familiarly uh big difference though is that there's some difference in terms of placement your PlayStation button is on the left side here there's a mute button on the right side that illuminates uh for your microphone and the there's no touch uh touchpads so like your dual sense has that touchpad and a little speaker here uh here you have the speaker at the top that plays your full game sounds um and you would use an onscreen uh indicator on the left and right side these rectangles with your thumbs uh to replace the touchpad uh the thumb sticks also are slightly different so something I noticed when I went in for a preview of the PlayStation portal was that the thumb scks were smaller than that of your dual sense or dual sense Edge controller and my assumption was that it would be the same thumb sticks actually as the psvr2 controller those are smaller but it's not that either it's some somewhere in between so the thumb stick on the PlayStation portal a little bit bigger than what's on the psvr2 and a little bit smaller than what's on the Dual sense and dual sense Edge controllers but playing games for long periods of time my thumbs really couldn't tell the difference um let's flip this on so you can see what that process is like so as you boot it up it says to unlock press the PS button there's no locking code you can't actually set a locking code or anything thing um but you press this and you see the circular portal so this has already been paired with my PlayStation uh and it says ready to play so it's a pretty fast handshake that's doing uh right now and I'm of course in this is the best case demo scenarios so I'm at home uh my PlayStation 5 is connected over ethernet to my wireless network uh and that is then send connected over uh 80211 AC so Wi-Fi 5 uh to the PlayStation portal it's not 8021 8X not Wi-Fi 6E and to be honest Remote Play would tap into those bandwidth uh uh limits anyway the minimum uh bandwidth requirement if you're tethering this to your smartphone for example uh which I did try uh is 5 megabits per second and it goes up to so says 15 megabits per second um and compared to the visual quality of remote play on a phone and tablet it's very similar the largest screen actually I think works to both its benefit and detriment it's a 1080 1080p screen here up to 60 frames per second and at the best case scenario I mean it looks really nice as we'll see and as we jump into a game um but uh any of the compression artifacts that are just a byproduct of it being compressed video are more noticeable here and Sony says that they haven't changed any of the remote play backend system to allow for higher uh bandwidth connections and in fact with remote play on PS5 there's no way to adjust any of those settings it will go automatically to 1080 if it feels like the connection is strong enough it feels like it's not if you're only at that 5 megabits per second it'll go down to 720 and 720 rendered here on this LCD it's pretty chunky it's pretty clunky it's I would say it's barely playable you really want to have this on a strongish Wi-Fi connection not just tether to to your phone now uh in terms of latency that was one of the things that we really want to compare and we're curious about on the PlayStation portal uh Sony says that this is a best case remote place scenario because the Dual sense controllers are physically hardwired to this whole system it's essentially an Android system let's be honest here and so I was curious how this would compare to using uh remote play on my phone with a Bluetooth dual sense connection uh versus like a tethered USB controller or even playing on the steam deck using uh chiaki for deck and doing side-by side comparisons on the menu you know seeing how responsive uh these controls felt it was nearly indistinguishable honestly I couldn't tell any discernable benefits of having this being a a wire connection over a wired USB controller or even over a Bluetooth connected dual sense controller it felt almost EX exactly the same uh the other type of latency that is more noticeable though is screen latency of course it's sending that compressed video signal over either your local network or over the cloud then back to the PlayStation portal and comparing the screen response time on these Remote Play devices compared to the HDMI connected TV the system and the setup that actually performed the best was the Remote Play app on my I iPhone connected over Wi-Fi 6 and using a Bluetooth controller uh looking at the side bys side comparisons and going frame by frame on a cutscene to see when the cut scene would switch uh on these local devices it was actually about a frame slower on both the PlayStation portal and on the steam deck than on the uh iPhone using the Remote Play app so not actually I think the optimal uh the best case scenario with this connection here although that one frame difference was barely noticeable it's only unless uh you go and and and do a direct comparison between all these devices do you actually notice that difference something that was more noticeable I found was compression in the video being sent across so I played the a bunch of Spider-Man 2 uh just on the PlayStation portal and it's a game where there's you know a lot of fast motion you're swinging through cities you're you know panning around there's a lot of fast action and where 60 frames per second 1080p does benefit um and make the game very playable but I did start noticing if you're looking at even texture detail or just some that geometry in the distance uh there's that Telltale blocks of uh telltale signs of the blocky video compression both motion compression and even when scenes are pretty still and you're doing like a slope pan for example uh you're going to see in high detail parts of the scene uh just that blockiness of the h265 video compression was pretty noticeable when I booted up for example astrobot and scenes that just have tons of you know grass detail and texture detail and near and far objects panning around definitely could tell that this was a compressed video image not something running locally um that's the the case across all remote play experiences uh but when you're playing this on a larger 8in screen like this I found that even more noticeable than playing on a smaller phone for example and I wish that Sony did more on the back end to allow for higher bit rate streaming or even customization for streaming quality on the portal because otherwise this is a pretty Bare Bones experience I mean other than the touch screen here we can tap to see your two touchpad analoges you can pull in the the menu from the side and there's not a ton you can do you can very easily disconnect uh from your PS5 you can connect to the PlayStation explore earbuds or the upcoming Elite headphones using this new 2.4 GHz PS link connection there's the brightness slider of course and interestingly enough an airplane mode that immediately disconnects you from the gameplay and disconnects the headphones as well and in the settings menu aside from connecting to to your Wi-Fi network um and few bits of system information things like you know the duration uh how long the idle period before going into rest mode so not a lot you can do uh you can turn off the uh lights on the side the blue lights on the touch uh the light bar here on the Dual sense controllers or the mute button uh or you can turn down the haptics the vibration intensity or that dual sense trigger effect hap that might save you a little bit of battery life but I mean if the point of this is to have those dual sense controllers that ergonomics I want to have that at Max uh Max response and Max uh haptic feedback battery life was the other big question with the PlayStation portal and Playstation the ps5s accessories famously don't have a ton of great battery life the Dual sense controller lasts you know between six and 7 hours dual sense Edge uh less than half of that and the PlayStation portal I did two battery rundown tests one just playing Spider-Man 2 normally pick it up for 30 minutes at a time set it back down change my brightness based on my ambient brightness and over the course of two days got about 4 and a half hours of Total play time on the PlayStation portals less than I had hoped or anticipated certainly enough to go through multiple play sessions uh but I did myself then plugging this into USBC once it hit you know near zero doing a straightforward battery rundown test using a medium brightness and turning off the haptics on the Dual sense controller you know having a rubber band that's to have it running non-stop got about 5 and 1 half hours of battery live streaming from the PS5 and to charge this it comes with a USBC cable doesn't come with a wall wart it expects you to plug this into your PS5 to charge it takes 2 and 1/2 hours to charge this fully and using a dedicated 45 watt wall wart uh took 105 minutes well under that 2 and a half hour charge time to go from zero to 100% and in fact with that 45 watt W War uh with hour of charge you can get up to 65% charge from zero so that's not too long for recharging and sufficient for sitting in your couch sitting your bed for bedtime playing this of course this is not really a divice you'd be playing on a car ride over you know your tether to your phone Cellular Connection or plane ride either that that Wi-Fi just won't work this is for you know playing in a hotel room if you're traveling uh or one of the best scenarios for this is you know at home if you have kids like I do and they're they want to use the TV then sure they can watch the TV and then I can send the couch using the portal and stream directly from the PlayStation 5 and that's really the ideal scenario for this this is for households where you're sharing your main TV or you just want the versatility of playing that your PS5 game in different rooms in your house in your office in your bed uh on your couch in a different you know ergonomic setting and ergonomically I've really dug this I think they had a nice balance between the weight the weight distribution and the feel of these controllers uh I just wish that the image quality was a little better on this I'm not even bummed out that they use an LCD you you know it's just streaming video so the video quality on like the OLED steam deck or an OLED iPhone is nicer the blacks are darker but you're not getting true HDR uh with that video playback and here I like the brightness I like the the quality of this LCD the color representation I just wish those compression artifacts weren't there maybe that's something that can they can change with a future software update uh including Maybe allowing you to tap into ps+ premiums Cloud streaming uh but as of right now it's pretty Bare Bones I wouldn't say a compromised gaming experience but a very straightforward No Frills PlayStation gaming experience people who buy this hopefully know what they're getting into you know it's there's a lot of misinformation about whether you can play this at home or outside someone else's home yeah sure you can connect this as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection um without a Wi-Fi connection there's nothing you can do on this and that's where there might be some confusion I think this holiday season I mean looking at the box here for the portal there's not a ton of information it should say I think you know very clearly this needs a PS5 the only indication is in the bottom corner here where it says required with icon for a Wi-Fi and an icon for the PlayStation 5 and the Texas PlayStation console sold separately um it really needs I think Sony really needs to make clear that this is not a device that you can play games on by itself that it's PlayStation 5 required and big bold text and that's just not here in the Box unfortunately um but for people who are excited about it I think they know what they're getting into and what they'll be getting is a best case scenario Remote Play experience now that's not to say that it can't be improved I think there's still plenty of room for Improvement on this um whether it's with maybe a big better screen maybe uh better controls morein to the PS Edge controller or just software uh improvements on the back end for remote play allowing for you to customize your settings allowing for higher bit rate all these things that are just not available right now um so I hesitate to recommend this based on updates and upgrades that may or may not be coming in the future and honestly there are a lot of options out there right now if you have a PS5 you want to try out Remote Play just to see if it's right for you you know pick up a $15 phone dock or if you want to see you know for example the Logitech g-cloud that allows you do more than just PlayStation streaming but you can also do remote play on that as well if you have questions about the PlayStation portal about the PS link system and the PlayStation explore earbuds also 00 uh please post them in the comments below otherwise thank you so much for watching I'm Norm from tested and I'll see you next time bye\n"