Alright, Ive been using mine since thursday morning, here are my impressions and "review"
Before we begin it must be stated I have a 3gbps fiber connection and that my PS5 is hardwired to my router. I also used the Portal a couple rooms away from it, nothing crazy like being in different floors or outside.
Positives:
- Setup and ease of use were incredibly easy, no need to fiddle with a ton of options, just scan a QR code and you're in.
- Comfort, this is the comfiest handheld I've used, because there's barely any guts it really isn't heavy and the cut in half dualsense is really good for ergonomics.
- Haptics, these are your standard DS haptics, they rock.
- Streaming quality, for me this was really good, sharp and clear, barely any breaks or artifacting while in gameplay, save for a couple instances while playing Star Ocean.
- Speakers are good, no complaints. Used a 3D pulse headset while wired and it worked really well too.
- Battery life was great, didn't really run out during my sessions, I just used my phone charger to charge it after I'm done.
As for the cons:
- This is just your regular remote play experience, now I'm not one of those people that expected this to play games natively or do other weird shit, but I did expect this being a Sony propietary solution to have some more in depth integration on a OS level.
Let me explain, when you set up remote play on your phone or other devices you do it via account linking and then you link it to the console, with the portal its the same, I was hoping to have some deeper control of my PS5, mainly being able to switch users without having to unlink and relink it to other user.
I would have liked to be able to remote play into the login menu and select which account I want to use. This is not a problem for most, but for me who uses different accounts for some games, this is a dealbreaker and going into this I was worried it would be like this, alas it is.
This also makes it so it's hard to pass it along to my wife so she can use it on her account for example.
The fact that it works the same as any other device makes it hard for me to justify keeping the portal when I can already do the same on other devices with better screens.
- The screen is just alright? It's not bad by any means, but it is underwhelming when compared to other screens around my house, at first it was easy to ignore with the games I was playing but then I decided to replay Ghost of Tsushima, and while the gameplay was fine you can really notice the washed out blacks and colors.
I also noticed when transitioning to a cutscene in GOT that the black bars were very gray and distracting, add to it a nice amount of backlight bleed on the top and lower right corner, once seen I could not unsee it. For me I really cannot tolerate backlight bleed, so any game with dark scenes and black bars became immediately unplayable.
Overall I think the Portal experience is very good for what it does but not quite there for me, it does not do enough to differentiate itself from other solutions (not phone with backphone, that shit sucks). So it is hard to justify keeping it at $305 cad after taxes.
If Sony ever gives us deeper OS integration and/or an OLED screen, I can see myself jumping back in, for now it's going back to Amazon.
It's a 7.5/10 for me if I had to give it a score.
Ok mate.
