AFTER being teased in May, Sony has officially unveiled that it will be dipping its toes into the handheld gaming market once again with the PlayStation Portal, a dedicated remote play streaming device.

Or rather, dipping a quarter of its toes, which we’ll get to later in the article.

The device, which should be obvious from the images released by Sony, has the key features of the DualSense controller, along with its adaptive triggers and haptic feedback.

The Portal also sports a 3.5mm audio jack and will use an 8-inch LCD screen to stream at 1080p resolution at 60fps.

That said, it is important to bear in mind that the Portal is not like the Nintendo Switch or Valve’s Steam Deck; it does not have the local processing power to run a game on the device itself.

To use it, the Portal has to be connected to the internet, along with the PlayStation 5 it is connected to, and it requires a wireless internet connection of at least 5Mbps.

This leads to the biggest head-scratching aspect of the Portal: it does not support the PlayStation+ cloud streaming service, which should have been a no-brainer inclusion during development.

The way PS+ cloud streaming functions is that PS+ Premium users can directly stream games to their PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5 without actually downloading the games onto the console’s hard disc drives.

As the PlayStation Portal is basically a screen and is already optimised for streaming video over Wi-Fi, it would have been the perfect device to natively support PS+ cloud streaming because the heavy processing for the games would be done on the servers.

Additionally, PS VR2 games are not supported either.

Due to the constraints that come with the device, the Portal seems like it is best suited for small households with a single TV; when others are using the TV, gamers can still use their PS5 using the Portal as the screen (as long as the house has Wi-Fi).

Along with the PlayStation Portal, Sony also revealed two new official PlayStation headsets: Pulse Explore, a set of earbuds, and the over-ear headphones Pulse Elite.

The device is expected to be launched later this year at a price point of US$200 (RM931). More accurate pricing in local currency and the release date will be revealed at a later time.