Images of Sony’s Next PlayStation Handheld Have Leaked

Once upon a time, Sony was a major competitor to Nintendo in the handheld gaming space. The PlayStation Portable gave Nintendo’s DS a run for its money, and the less-successful Vita was a welcome follow-up that pleased many fans before it was dropped.

Since then, Sony hasn’t really touched the handheld gaming space, but that’s set to change later this year — and we’ve got our best look yet at the new PlayStation handheld console.

Sony’s next PlayStation handheld, called Project Q internally, was officially unveiled earlier this year after months of speculation and insider leaks. The device, Sony says, will feature an 8-inch display, and all the features of a PS5 DualSense controller, thanks to the fact that it is literally just two halves of a DualSense slapped to the side of a tablet.

It’s not a handheld in the traditional sense, either. Instead of having its own library of games to play, Project Q will stream games from your PS5 console over WiFi. It won’t have any cellular capabilities, and Sony only really mentions local WiFi streaming, so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to use it while away from your home network.

While we were treated to a few renders and flashy product shots (that were probably also renders), Sony hasn’t treated us to any pictures or videos of the actual product in hand. So naturally, as tech products tend to do, somebody took the task into their own hands and leaked a bunch of pictures and a video of the product, which was subsequently posted on Twitter.

As you can see, it sure does look like exactly what Sony promised — it’s a big tablet with a DualSense sawn in half and attached to the side of it. In the video, it seems to be running what looks like a fairly vanilla Android distribution, though it’s worth noting this is obviously a very early version of the software and is very much likely to change.

Still, many had speculated that Project Q could just be a heavily locked down Android tablet running the existing Remote Play Android app, and with this information, that could very well be the case. Or maybe Sony’s just using Android as a testbed, and some custom OS could be on the way in the final product.

Either way, if there’s an almost-complete Project Q out there somewhere, it probably won’t be long before we see it officially. Sony says the handheld will be released sometime before the end of the year.