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My enjoyment of the PlayStation Portal has been ever-present because it launched in late 2023, however 2025’s transformative updates have made it a superb cloud gaming machine, elevating the hand-held to new ranges – and heightening my love for it exponentially.
I used to be away from house for round three weeks lately for the vacations and solely had entry to the Portal for gaming. It was my absolute savior, and now, enhanced by its cloud streaming talents, I had a lot extra at my fingertips than what I used to be in a position to put together on my PlayStation 5 Pro at house.
I managed to play on it for hours and hours right here and there, making use of each play modes (that’s distant play and cloud streaming) in consequence. However, one factor actually does nonetheless irk me in regards to the handheld: its battery’s charging time.
Familiarity with familiarity
First, the good stuff. Boy, does the PlayStation Portal keep offering an exceptional way for me to play my PS5 games and work on the backlog, but this holiday season, after its cloud streaming update, and being away from home for a few weeks, it really took that to another level. I was able to carry on getting hours of gaming in almost every day to play pretty much everything I wanted.
Previously, when going away from home, I’d be conscious to leave my TV unit door open, to ensure my PS5 Pro could breathe and not be suffocated by its own hot air after each remote session, but this time I needn’t have bothered. The ability to now stream my own games, on top of everything included in the PS Plus Premium cloud library, meant that even games I had expected to play remotely were now at my fingertips through the internet.
As a result, streaming and quickly jumping into The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Control: Ultimate Edition, and starting an annual playthrough of The Last of Us Part I complemented remote playing Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered beautifully.
Not hugely new games, and all ones that I’ve played before, but the Portal having this extra string to its bow means there’s more opportunity and more convenience to being able to replay familiar favorites rather than have to convince myself to jump back into things I know and love over newer titles.
Familiar games naturally feel right at home on the Portal – now a very familiar device for me – so it is a sort of circular confirmation. But if I were playing new games, it’d be exactly the same: streaming your own games and those on the cloud is just brilliant for Portal users.
Taking its sweet time
But it wasn’t all perfectly rosy. One flaw with the Portal kept ruffling my feathers: its battery. And I’m not even talking about battery life, but rather how unbelievably slowly it charges up once you’ve used it. Overall battery life has also been a chink in the armor for the Portal, though personally, I’ve always found the duration reliable enough for my play sessions; the charging, however, is painfully slow.
So much so that, after finding a couple of hours of playtime nearly every early morning over the course of the holidays, I routinely had to plan specifically when and where to charge the Portal so it could sit uninterrupted to refill its juice, and ensure it’d be safely topped up for the next play session.
Then, almost every subsequent check of the charging progress was met with disappointment. It was like one’s own potential bank balance: always lower than you think. This was also the ire of my family, who wanted to charge their phones. Oops.
In a world where we have ultra-fast phone chargers and an array of charge-delivery systems for laptops, tablets, and other devices, especially when you look at GaN chargers, I am extra baffled by the charging pace, or lack thereof, for the Portal’s battery. For context, it has always taken me around two and a half hours (sometimes longer) to get the Portal back to 100% from nearly empty. Thus, given my holiday play sessions took the device down to around 50%, I was looking at needing it to be tethered for comfortably more than an hour.
I love my launch Portal still, despite that, but if there is ever to be a revision of the device, then a much-improved battery with faster charging time – a dedicated quick charge function would be a joy – has to be near the top of the list for Sony when considering how to make this brilliant device even better.
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