STATION TO STATION PlayStation Portal

Not quite the Nintendo Switch rival we were hoping for, but the PlayStation Portal can still be a perfect match for a PlayStation 5

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The PlayStation Portal Remote Player, to use its full name, is a portable games machine with its own screen and wrapped in a controller – much like a Switch or many of the other portable consoles, but it’s also quite different. It doesn’t technically run games, for starters.

Instead, it uses a PlayStation 5’s existing Remote Play functionality to stream games over a home or external wireless connection, using your PS5 as the host and the Portal as a receiver.

The Portal only has an LCD touchscreen, but it’s highly impressive nonetheless. Being eight inches means it is beefy and bold enough to make a gameplay session feel more tangible, and it has a decent viewing angle to boot.

The PlayStation Portal has no on-board storage and you cannot install games directly on it. It therefore requires a wireless network connection to run. However, that can be at home on the same network as your PlayStation 5 or, as we’ve tested, over a remote data hook up.

Streaming at home is a seamless experience with so little lag that it’s imperceptible. Indeed, we left the TV on too at one point to see how much latency there is and control movements worked on both screens simultaneously.

The performance when out and about is less reliable, as it will entirely depend on the data connection. Running the Portal on a 4G mobile signal in a fairly remote area resulted in a drop in resolution and frame rate, but Spider-Man 2 was still eminently playable.