While Sony has largely given up on the handheld market following the death of the now-lamented PlayStation Vita, the company is taking another swing at the PlayStation Portal. Following in Nintendo’s footsteps, Sony will release a Japan-only version of its handheld. The specs are mostly unchanged: the region-locked Portal will have the same 1080p LCD screen and will still be built around remotely accessing a PS5 to play games.
The big difference is that this version will have internal storage. Because of this added hard drive, the region-locked Portal will cost the same as the global model in Japan, 39,980 yen ($252). Like the Japan-exclusive PS5, it's in Midnight Black.
The PlayStation Portal's main selling point is that it lets users remotely stream games from their PS5 while connected to the same Wi-Fi as the console, so the base version doesn’t really need built-in storage. Adding a hard drive suggests the new version may eventually do more than stream; the product description says Sony included it “with an eye towards future functionality.” It’s unclear if that future functionality is for the PlayStation 5 or for the presumed PlayStation 6. It isn’t surprising that Sony is releasing a Japan-only PlayStation Portal.
The company previously took this approach with the PlayStation 5, releasing a region-locked version of the console for the equivalent of $350. Much like Nintendo released a Japan-only version of the Switch 2, Sony did this to make the system more accessible to domestic customers amid the yen’s declining purchasing power. The PlayStation Portal sold reasonably well despite its seemingly limited use case, moving an estimated 420,000 units in the U.S. alone within its first year.
However, critics had mixed reactions. While it was praised for its build and screen quality, many reviews found that even mild connection issues had a huge impact on gameplay. The system’s streaming-only design, combined with a $199.99 price point, made it a fairly niche device.
That said, Sony has improved the system's software over the years, adding better streaming settings for those with beefy home networks. Perhaps the device's biggest change is that Sony eventually added cloud gaming support, meaning the device was no longer restricted to PS5 owners. This lets users play any game with PS Plus cloud support, as long as they have a PS Plus Premium subscription (which costs $159.99 a year).
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