I finally bit the bullet and picked up a PlayStation Portal earlier this year, and I’ve been really impressed by how well it fits into my daily gaming routine.
Now, I can chip away at my backlog of games on a handheld, and I likely wouldn’t have found the time to play games like Blue Prince and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 without it. Even so, I had always found the PS Portal a little tricky to recommend, given its reliance on streaming from a preferably nearby PS5 console. This has now all changed thanks to a firmware update that arrived earlier this month, unlocking cloud streaming, direct from your PlayStation library – and the arrival of the Black Friday PS5 deals.
Thanks to this cloud streaming overhaul, you no longer have to have a PS5 at all to use the PlayStation Portal, and as long as you have PS Plus Premium, you’ll have a catalogue of games available to stream immediately.
While the $199.99 / £199.99 RRP did maybe seem a little high when the Portal launched, the device is now an absolute must-buy in my opinion. I think it’s very likely my favorite PS5 accessory, and it’s becoming one that I use more often than the console itself over time.
My daily driver
I originally bought the PlayStation Portal so that I could play games in bed, lying down on the sofa, or while hanging out with my cat on the kitchen floor (it’s his favorite pastime, okay?). Over time, I started to favor the handheld over playing games on the big screen, mostly as my partner could then game alongside me on the sofa.
In terms of a gaming handheld, the PS Portal is the only one that’s felt good in my hands. The Nintendo Switch 2 makes my arms go numb, and I’m pretty sure I still have permanent wrist damage from my PS Vita. By essentially being a screen glued between two halves of a proper PS5 controller, the PS Portal is unrivaled in its form factor and in how long I can play before my arms start to feel a bit stiff.
Almost missed ya
One of the best parts of owning a PlayStation Portal is that I’m gaming more, generally in shorter bursts. I’ve played a bunch of games this year that I simply wouldn’t have had time for otherwise. This includes nearly 40 hours of Blue Prince exclusively on the Portal, and I sometimes even load up Arc Raiders to go on simple resource-gathering runs when I have a spare 20 minutes or so.
As someone who covers games for a living, having a quick way to chip away at different games has been a lifesaver, and I’ve been surprised by how well even big blockbusters like Death Stranding 2 have run on the PS Portal.
Up in the cloud
Sony released an update for the PlayStation Portal earlier this month, adding in cloud streaming for all PS Plus Premium members. Now, you don’t have to access your PS5 at all, as the cloud streaming has its own dedicated menu tab.
I’ve yet to test things extensively, but the other night I booted up my PS Plus catalogue and rapidly switched from title to title. I played the opening level of Time Splitters: Future Perfect before diving into Fortnite to work on some quests, all without switching my PS5 on at all.
It would seem I now have a huge library of games that I can access in seconds, all from the cloud streaming menu of the PlayStation Portal. Whereas I may have skipped dipping into classics like Jak & Daxter before, mostly because I couldn’t be bothered to download them, I can now just pick and choose whatever I want to play. So far, performance has been surprisingly close to the main streaming mode, and I’m surprised by how seamless everything is.
Because of the recent firmware updates to the PlayStation Portal, it’s now a very easy device to recommend to all PS5 users. In fact, it’s actually a very cheap way to play PS5 games without needing to buy a console, something that simply wasn’t the case just a few months ago.
When paired with the PS Portal’s current Black Friday prices, the new features really make the PS Portal a completely unrivaled piece of hardware. Sure, you could spend a few hundred more on a Steam Deck, or a few hundred more on a ROG Xbox Ally X, but why bother when the PS Portal exists as cheaply, and with as many bells and whistles as it does?
If you’re not in the UK or the US, keep an eye out for the best PS Portal Black Friday deals via the widget below.
