Sony PlayStation Portal: Price, release date & specifications

The PlayStation Portal is almost upon us, and it’s now up for preorder. Find out where to buy it, price, specs & more.

Sony has finally announced more details about its upcoming handheld cloud console. The PlayStation Portal, as it will be called, is a remote play-first system that will stream games from your PlayStation 5 and launch in November.

In an official announcement, the company revealed the PlayStation Portal’s official moniker, price, and features, shared some high-resolution images, and introduced a couple of additions to the PlayStation ecosystem.

PlayStation Portal, previously named Project Q, leaked in early 2023, and the company confirmed its existence in May. Now sharing its price and key specifications, Sony is amping up the hype for the year-end product announcement that almost everyone awaits.

We dive deep into all the speculation around PlayStation Portal’s rumored cost, specifications, and more.

Contents:

• PlayStation Portal price
• PlayStation Portal release date
• PlayStation Portal specifications
• Will PlayStation Portal support other streaming services?
• Is PlayStation Portal a PS Vita 2?

Where to buy the PlayStation Portal

You can get the PlayStation Portal through Best Buy, as well as PlayStation Direct. The wireless device will presumably hit other more general retailers over the course of the next few weeks.

Sony PlayStation Portal price

The Sony PlayStation Portal is priced at $199.99/219.99 EUROS/199.99 GBP. This aligns with earlier reports hinting that the console will be priced at around $200.

This competitive pricing makes the PlayStation Portal way more affordable than the Logitech G-Cloud cloud gaming console, priced at $349.99, and the Abxylute gaming console retails at $229.

However, unlike the other two consoles mentioned above, the PlayStation Portal’s dependency on a PS5 makes it unique, for better and worse.

Sony PlayStation Portal release date

The Sony PlayStation Portal will launch on November 15, 2023. According to PlayStation Blog, the device is currently available for preorder in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

Beginning September 29, the PlayStation Portal remote player can be preordered in the aforementioned countries in addition to Canada and Japan.

The current idea is that Sony wants to launch this alongside the rumored PlayStation 5 Slim to have a healthy refresh of products before the inevitable launch of the PS5 Pro. We’ll have to wait and see for those announcements, as it is all currently a rumor.

Sony PlayStation Portal specifications

Sony

Sony has confirmed that the Portal will house a vibrant 8-inch LCD screen with 1080p resolution at 60fps. It will have a 3.5mm headphone jack to let users plug in a wired headphone of their choice while streaming games on this portable console.

Since the Portal will not have Bluetooth connectivity, you might have to buy a new PlayStation Link-compatible headset, which Sony also announced. This is a cost-cutting measure and might disappoint some users.

Sony claims the Portal will allow users to stream and play games installed on their PS5. This will require the PS5 and the Portal to be connected to a fast Wi-Fi network. The PlayStation Portal will not be able to run the PS VR2 games nor support PS5 cloud streaming.

Based on what Sony has revealed, we know you’ll be unable to use the PlayStation Portal for media consumption. The console will not even support local media play. Regarding the battery life, you can expect a backup similar to the DualSense controllers, which is already less than stellar.

While the company has not revealed the chip powering the PlayStation Portal, it is expected to ship with an ultra-low powered system-on-chips (SoC), similar to the Logitech G-Cloud and Abxylute’s Cloud Gaming Console, which is meant to drive a video feed rather than any local games.

Processor speculation

While we don’t expect Sony to skimp on costs, we expect something closer in power levels to the Logitech G-Cloud than the Razer Edge. It might not be a bad idea, considering the modest Abxylute can dish out 1080p, 60FPS over cloud gaming. There is a possibility that the Portal might use Snapdragon’s new G series chips, designed for gaming handhelds, that have just been introduced.

The Abxylute runs an MT8365 processor, which was released back in 2021. It can support DDR4 RAM, as well as eMMC storage. While we suspect the PlayStation Portal will have around 4GB of RAM, we expect Sony to attempt to one-up its Japanese competitor with more robust hardware.

In our testing of the Logitech and Abxylute devices, we found that their implementation of Android was the most significant criticism. When browsing Android on such low-end specs, it can sometimes begin to lag or stutter. However, all this is killed off as soon as you load into an application. Sony has not announced if the device will use Android to power the PlayStation Portal.

Logitech fitted its handheld with a Snapdragon 720G, technically superior to the Abxylute handheld but still a few years old. However, the SoC won’t matter all that much due to the intentions of the design of the device itself.

Screen

Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation Portal handheld will have a 1080p, 60Hz, 8-inch screen. This correlates with reports from Insider Gaming. The display technology is rumored to be a normal LCD with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

As long as the chip onboard can support a high-speed Wi-Fi connection – preferably Wi-Fi 6E – and bring in a high-quality image, it’ll have succeeded in doing its job.

Based on leaked footage from an early build of the device, it appears early screen intel was on point regarding sizing. However, we’re yet to see games actually running on the device at the time of writing.

PlayStation Project Q Leaks:#PlayStation #ProjectQ https://t.co/gyFrsW7xkN pic.twitter.com/0R0yQIdr0I

— @Zuby_Tech (@Zuby_Tech) July 22, 2023

Wi-Fi

Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation Portal will run on Wi-Fi. We expect that the Sony PlayStation Portal will use Wi-Fi 6E to maintain the best wireless standard out right now. It makes no sense for Sony not to support the new standard, as lower-end Internet connections could make the experience of using the device pretty miserable.

However, with the PS5 supporting Wi-Fi 6 internally, we’d take a guess that Sony will be fitting the PlayStation Portal with the same technology.

Will the Sony PlayStation Portal support other streaming services?

Sony

The Sony PlayStation Portal won’t support other streaming services out of the box. We have yet to learn what operating system PlayStation Portal will be supporting. Presumptions would lead us to believe it’s Android-based – Sony’s mobile and TV brands use it – but it could wind up using a fork of the PS5’s OS instead or something entirely new.

The PS5 currently runs a heavily customized version of FreeBSD, a spin on the original Unix operating systems. According to some open-source crediting, it’s presently running FreeBSD 11. The PS3 and PS4 also ran it, bringing to prominence the XMB interface.

If Sony decides to load PlayStation Portal up with a version of FreeBSD, it could slow down homebrewers looking to crack it open for use with other platforms.

However, if there’s a web browser included with PlayStation Portal, this could be an opportunity for Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now to worm their way onto the system.

Will the Sony PlayStation Portal be a Vita 2?

No, as far as we know, the Sony PlayStation Portal will be a cloud handheld rather than a dedicated handheld like the Vita.

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