How to play your PS5 in your hands and not on your TV screen

Letting you enjoy your console video games without taking up the TV, Sony’s new PlayStation 5 Remote Player opens up the possibility of continuing your Spider-Man or God of War adventures during a family movie, in bed, in the garden, or even further afield.

Remote play is not a new concept. In fact, Sony has supported it in some form for more than a decade, and right now you could stream a game from your PS5 to your phone entirely for free, or with a $180 Backbone One controller attached. But this new $330 device, dubbed the PlayStation Portal, is Sony’s first device solely designed for this feature, and so has some advantages.

The PlayStation Portal only does one thing, but it does it pretty well.

At its best, the Portal is an absolutely seamless and turnkey solution that lets you play your PS5 games in your hands instead of on the big screen.

Initial setup requires changing some settings on your console, and then it’s simply a matter of picking it up and turning it on, and in a few seconds you’ll see your home screen, or, if the PS5 was already in use, whatever game you’re in the middle of.

It’s just as comfortable to hold as a regular DualSense controller, it has the same immersive and tactile features like adaptive triggers, and since all the hard work is still being done by the console it lasts for ages on a charge and never gets warm. Plus the LCD touchscreen is stunning, and at 8 inches is a great size for handheld play at home.

This is all a big advantage over Remote Play with a phone.

The PlayStation Portal (centre), with a standard DualSense controller and an iPhone in a Backbone One mount.Credit: Tim Biggs

But the inherent limitations of Remote Play still apply. The console is sending a full frame of HD video over your local network to the Portal 60 times every second, plus streaming audio, and the Portal is sending back your button presses.

That’s a lot of data, and a small amount of latency (that is, a delay between your button presses and seeing the result on-screen) is unavoidable.

Retro games like Sonic the Hedgehog, or modern games which demand a high level of twitch reaction like competitive shooters, are tough to play using any form of streaming because of the latency.

When you first start a streaming session, or if you’re a long way from your router, you’ll also likely get a blurry image that looks like a bad Netflix connection but improves over time. And if your network is clogged, or you’re moving around your house while playing, the stream can lag or skip which is much more frustrating for video games than it is for movies.

For best results you need to make sure your PS5 is connected with an ethernet cable (not via Wi-Fi), and if your router has a 5GHz network available, make sure the Portal uses it. In that scenario, I found I could sit anywhere in my house and play a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 (which doesn’t require fast reaction times) and have a stellar time with the Portal. You entirely forget that the game’s coming from another room.

In fact, you can have the game come from another city; if you have decent upload speeds at home, you can use the Portal to connect using any Wi-Fi network in the world. But this vastly complicates matters, and in my experience you either have a fairly good experience or it falls over immediately, depending on the stability of your Wi-Fi.

Oddly, there are a few ways in which the Portal actually offers an inferior experience to some Remote Play solutions out there. There is no support for Bluetooth audio, only wired 3.5mm or “PS Link” for Sony’s own wireless headsets (Bluetooth is horrendously laggy when it comes to video games, but the option would be nice). Plus unofficial streaming apps like PSPlay can get the PS5 to stream in HDR and high frame rates, where the Portal can not.

The Portal’s software is also very bare-bones with few options. It would be nice to at least be able to customise how the touchscreen emulates the DualSense touchpad because by default it’s quite confusing.

Yet I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Portal updated with more features in the future, not least because Sony is beginning to enable the streaming of PS5 games from the cloud in some regions, and that would seem like an ideal application for a device like this.

As it stands today, the Portal is a brilliant piece of kit for an extremely specific purpose, which only a small subset of PS5 owners is going to be interested in.

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.