if you were expecting me to jump on the hate bandwagon for this thing you're
going to end up sorely disappointed I do have problems with the PlayStation
portal but I've been a believer in remote game streaming for as long as
some of you have been alive starting with the NVIDIA shield no not that one
the handheld one that everyone including NVIDIA seems to have forgotten about I
played Tomb Raider 2013 start to finish on that thing infant sun in lap without
ever touching my keyboard and mouse it was my portal to gaming at a time when I
otherwise couldn't make time for it so look if you're not psyched for this
thing I get it but I am or at least I
will be if Sony has ironed out all the troubleshooting nonsense that has made
this technology kind of inaccessible for the average gamer setup challenge begins
now uh Power English does anyone know the Wi-Fi
password thank you for the ortholinear keyboard just kidding I
agree approve select PS5 allow
connection to PS5 settings system remote play and turn on remote play
settings system oh it was on it was I hit X to
connect oh wait oh okay it worked
overall not as smooth as it could have been not a huge fan of that tiny press X
to continue indicator in the bottom left but we're still completely set up and
ready to game in just 3 and 1/2 minutes that's not bad
now let's see how fast we can segue to our sponsor ug green their Black Friday
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that's a lot check it out at the link below I'm definitely picking up on a
little bit of a delay but Hollow night's a pretty unforgiving game as far as that
goes and this is not bad what are we looking at 150 milliseconds 150
milliseconds and that is complete chain
yes that is very usable there's definitely some banding and blocking
particularly when things get really busy on screen you've got smoke or lots of
particle effects flying around but the display looks great super sharp very
usable don't judge the portal based on how I'm doing right now I have only
played like an hour and a bit of this game and the save is much deeper in than
I thought visually this is a super busy
game with really Lush environments I am expecting it to be oh
a lot less visual artifact than I was
expecting once again particle effects and smoke going to be a bit of a
struggle but anything reasonably close to you doesn't look bad at all I'm also
a little surprised at how Okay the text looks especially when the menu looked so
bad when it first loaded up oh yeah know that seems fine now there's no question
the game is playable does it have a performance mode though favorite performance let's see how that
feels oh yeah that's more like it this is 100%
how I play this wow nice Sound Stage where are
these speakers oh they're top top firing
woo man this one looks particularly okay maybe it helps that
it's at night definitely managing to notice some visual anomalies with all
these Bright Lights moving around on screen kind of like confetti when you're
running at a low bit rate but the truth is if I was just playing the game and
not busy trying to evaluate the device there's nothing about the visuals or the
sound that would make me go oh this sucks forget it I think I'm getting
ahead of myself a little though let's take a tour from the front it's as
though you were playing a game on your dual sense controller and a dimensional
wizard came along and opened up an 8 in Portal right down the middle and I
consider that to be a really good thing the Dual sense is Far and Away my
favorite PlayStation controller ever and probably the best first party design on
the market right now and the only thing that's really missing is the touchpad
now I'm not going to sugarcoat this the onscreen replacement for this kind of
sucks but I'm hoping that it can be fixed in software and I'm pretty
confident Sony's going to get this figured out what they can't fix in
software is that the sticks are measurably smaller but it's the kind of
thing that I didn't notice until I went looking for it and makes sense when you
consider that this is a device that's likely to be stuffed into your backpack
say maybe in this handy little screen safe spot right here LTT Store.com even
with the angle of the screen I think it's fair to say that this is one of the
most comfortable handheld gaming devices that we have ever seen it's not light at
529 G it is noticeably heavier than its nearest competitor the Logitech g-cloud
and it even weighs more than some full-blown handheld consoles notably the
switch OLED but it puts the user in a
much wider more ergonomic posture that
in in my opinion mostly offsets the weight even during longer play sessions
but the real killer feature of the portal is the price okay okay okay okay
look I know you could just throw your
phone in a backbone and game on that at a fraction of the cost but hear me out
guys okay you get a first party grade controller with adaptive triggers and
haptic feedback you get a decent 8 in screen you got a battery speakers Wi-Fi
packaging and shipping a processor with accelerated video decode and some RAM
and storage obviously this appears to be a Snapdragon 662 from early reports but
we don't have pricing for that so let's use a Raspberry Pi Z as a price proxy
you'll need an operating system that probably needed to be developed at some point and somewhere in there you've got
to find some margin for Sony's Retail Partners and God willing Sony themselves
so look I know $200 is a lot to ask for
an accessory to a $500 device but you
know what else is $200 the Dual sense Edge and that's just a controller so if
we're not outraged about that I don't see why we have a problem with this and
I get it this product might not speak to you and that's fine but I think
attacking its price is a poor use of our
finite anger energy especially when there are other places we could direct
it that are much more valid back to our
tour then the device charges and charges
only through a bottom mounted USBC Port meaning that there's great ergonomics
when you're playing with it but no your display Ethernet or Bluetooth dongles
will not work which isn't the main
problem the main problem is why would
you need a Bluetooth dongle let me put it this way you have multiple options
for audio playback the 3 and 12 mm headphone jack which is right next to
the USBC Port the top firing stereo speakers or the companion pulse series
headphones from Sony via PlayStation link I says pardon yeah you heard me in
spite of its mobile first design the portal has no support for Bluetooth
Sony's justification for this is that PlayStation link and their proprietary
low latency lossless audio format are going to deliver a better gaming
experience than Bluetooth when they launch their Pulse Elite headset or
pulse explore earbuds later this year and that's fair enough even modern
Bluetooth 5.x can struggle when streaming highquality realtime audio but
to not give me the option if that's a
drawback that I'm willing to accept especially when the hardware is
obviously in there that's just insulting
oh how do I know the hardware is in there well for one thing I can't think
of a single modern Wi-Fi chipset that doesn't also integrate Bluetooth and for
another those pulse headphones do
support Bluetooth if you pair them to another device like say for example a
Nintendo switch so it's likely that Sony is just tweaking the encoding and could
choose to operate in standard mode like Nintendo eventually did my other big
issue with it is battery life like the Logitech g-cloud the portal is dead
silent and stays cool to the touch but the g-cloud managed over 11 hours of
gaming on its 6,000 mAh battery the portal four I understand they had a
price to hit but that is huge
I mean the charge time is okay at least but still this compromise is the
difference between this thing kicking around my house and I just grab it and
game on it when I feel like it and me needing to remember to charge it after
every session then go get it when I actively want to use it kind of like the
Dual sense the last controversial cut was to wireless wi-fi 5 really Sony I
mean the PS5 itself which launched 3 years ago has Wi-Fi 6 however this one
might not be as big of a deal as you'd think while gaming we found that the
portal was eating up about 10 to 14 megabits per second so there is no way
that you would saturate a Wi-Fi 5 connection unless you were at the very
limits of your router's range and even if you were Wi-Fi 6 would be pretty
unlikely to help anyway since that generational bump didn't come with any
big improvements to range though of course it should be noted that all of
this depends on your specific setup and the quality of your network which
actually doesn't need to be that high I guess 14 megabit let's talk about what
that means for image quality cuz that's a lot lower than I expected for 1080p60
as I alluded to earlier you are going to notice some streaming compression while
gaming on the portal especially in the finer details of busy scenes like for
example the Sandman opening of Spider-Man 2 but the reality of it is
that's going to be the case with any wireless video streaming device and we
found that most of the time it wasn't too distracting
one little tip is that we would strongly recommend setting your games to 60fps
Performance mode when using the portal you're unlikely to notice the better
visual Fidelity on such a small screen not to mention over a stream anyway and
the higher your frame rate the lower your input latency which is going to be
doubly important if you expect to use the portal away from your house Sony
does support this use case which is super cool because it kind of turns your
PlayStation into a personal cloud gaming server service that has no monthly
subscription but it is going to add anywhere from another 10 milliseconds of
latency best case scenario to 50 100
milliseconds or even more depending on your distance from home and that's even
with a decent connection and assuming you will actually be able to use it you
see Sony in their infinite wisdom has opted not to include an internet browser
on the portal which means that as of this time there is no way to authentic
icate with captive portal wireless networks like the kind found in
restaurants hotels or basically anywhere that isn't your friend's or your mom's
house you could tether to your phone I guess but at least if you live in North
America that is only going to be an option if you really hate money and also
hate image quality now our guess is that this was done to deter home brew and
jailbreaking since browsers tend to be a point of Ingress for these kinds of
console hacks but only time will tell if Sony's approach is going to work and if
it's going to to be worth the outrage that this is causing amongst their
customers I got to admit if it can be jailbroken I find that pretty exciting
and there already seems to be some work going on though herx here isn't being
entirely realistic uh no switch emulator is going to be running on this wimpy
little s so but if this thing is just
running Android and someone does manage to root it nothing would prevent you
from running Moonlight on it and playing PC games at desktop quality on this
great screen with this great controller if it is on the subject of things you
can't do with the portal at the moment ps+ premium streaming I know WTF right I
mean you can stream from your own PlayStation but not from Sony's
Playstation streaming service not even if it routes through your own
PlayStation In fairness that would probably butcher the experience but
still I think it says a lot about how low tier they had to go on the hardware
to make this thing happen at this price price coming back to good news though
they didn't seem to cheap out on the screen while we weren't able to run our
test patterns for a full analysis the screen looks vibrant to the eye and
managed 493 nits Peak brightness under real world conditions which is very
similar to what we measured on the Logitech g-cloud wireless it runs at
1080p 60 HZ meaning that under ideal conditions it'll look noticeably sharper
than the steam deck and while it's an LCD not an OLED the glossy finish does
help make black Rel pop and it looks pretty darn good it's SDR which is kind
of a bummer considering that remote play already has support for HDR on your PC
or your phone for that matter which is another compelling argument for using a
strap-on controller if you don't mind the smaller screen but I think we made
it clear in our cost breakdown why a brighter HDR display probably wasn't in
the cards and wouldn't have helped battery life
either now before it was announced there were rumors that the portal would be
more of a a standalone device like the PlayStation vaita rather than a device
dedicated to streaming games from the PlayStation 5 you already own and I can
see why people were excited for that but now that it's in our hands we love how
easy it is to use and I feel like the Simplicity is one of the Portal's
greatest strengths I mean I've made my issues with it clear at this point but I
feel like it's a lot like the psvr2 it's
great Tech at a fair price that is is as
long as you're willing to enter a monogamous relationship with Sony or
wait for Community tinkerers to uh strip out the limitations as it is today
though we can't rely on that but if you've already bought into the PS5
ecosystem and you share a TV with other people in your house the portal gives
more value to the console you already own value that I would argue is well
worth the cost of admission my only worry is whether the portal will
continue to give value beyond the PS5
see it's hard to predict if the PlayStation 6 for example will be able
to stream to the portal since Sony's track record with backwards and forwards
compatibility is complicated to say the
least what's not complicated is where you can go to buy one we're going to
have links to where to buy the PlayStation portal and also a link to
our sponsor ug green ah Black Friday the
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products on sale too at the link below if you guys enjoyed this video maybe go
check out our review of the steam deck OLED it's more than double the price but
given it has a full fat gaming PC strapped to the back of it I would argue
that it's more than double the fun as well