PlayStation Portal

Earlier this year, Sony announced Project Q, an utterly bizarre handheld PlayStation device for streaming PS5 games and nothing else. At the time, there was no indication of the price, the release window, or even the name of the final product. Now, we have all of those things, and we’re still left wondering what the point of it is.

As revealed on the PlayStation Blog, the Project Q has had a graceful name change to the PlayStation Portal, a name undoubtedly designed to be shortened to PSP. As we saw back when the handheld was first announced, it’s essentially an 8-inch LCD screen with a sawn-in-half DualSense controller on either side. It’s not the most graceful-looking device, but it does the job and immediately conveys what it’s all about.

And what is it all about? Streaming your PS5 games to the handheld over wifi, so you can play PS5 games in bed or on the toilet if you’re a heathen. Obviously, in order to make the most of the device, or even use the device at all, you’ll need a PS5, since all it does is stream PS5 games, and can’t play any games or do anything on its own.

The price is where things start to get dicey. If you want a device that you can stream PS5 gameplay to, you can spend like $50-80 on some sort of controller thing for your phone, like a Backbone or a Razer Kishi. If you want a PlayStation Portal, you’ll instead be paying $199 USD.

That’s the same price as a Nintendo Switch Lite – although that’s often discounted well below that too – or you could spend just a little bit more and get a refurbished Xbox Series S. Look, it’s not the worst price in the world, we were actually expecting it to be closer to $300, but it’s a pretty big ask for a locked down Android tablet with a DualSense glued to it.

As for other features, it’ll have a 3.5mm headphone jack, but no bluetooth audio, and a USB-C charging port, as you’d expect. The battery life is reportedly aiming to be about the same as a DualSense controller, which could be anywhere from 2 to 7 hours if my controllers are anything to go by.

As for when it’s releasing, there’s no exact date yet, but preorders are expected to open “soon” and the PlayStation Portal is said to be releasing by the end of the year.