PlayStation Portal review
On paper the PlayStation Portal sounds like a great idea — it allows you to play your PS5 anywhere with a solid, stable Wi-Fi connection. Unfortunately, that theory of a perfect, lag-free experience dissolves pretty much immediately when you put it in the real world.
Between latency issues on my 300Mbps / 300Mbps wireless network and the inability to stream content from services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube due to DRM rules, the Portal just couldn’t deliver an enjoyable experience or one I’d feel comfortable recommending.
Its 8-inch LCD screen offers Full HD resolution — which can look nice for a few seconds at a time — but, in my experience, was often filled with visual artifacts and stutter. The latency caused audio playback to become choppy, turning some of the most emotionally poignant moments from games like God of War: Ragnarok, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Horizon Forbidden West into meme-worthy snippets of video. In Sony’s defense, however, our second review sample used by my colleague in the U.K. fared much better, with less stuttering and noticeably lower latency.
This, in short, is the issue: It's a device that lives and dies not only by the speed of the network you're connected to, but also the distance you are from the router and even the layout of your home or apartment. The PlayStation Portal will likely deliver on its promise of a latency-free experience for some buyers, but if my experience is anything like the one you’ll have, I’m not sure Sony’s game-streaming-only handheld console is a good solution to what I think is a very niche problem.
