The Portal is a day one purchase for me. Sure, it’s niche, but I often get kicked off the PS5 so my SO can watch TV, so this will be a godsend so I can keep playing.
I do use the Remote Play app, but I find it often lags or almost loses connection too much, and the latency can sometimes be bad, even with our 400mbps internet connection.
Hopefully with Sony engineering behind it, it will be more reliable connection-wise than Remote Play, and I’m excited to be able to jump straight in without having to mess around with opening apps and connecting or pairing controllers.
If you have lag with the phone, you’ll have lag with the portal as well. It won’t work like the Wii U gamepad and will not do an ad-hoc connection. You need to look at your network setup.
I have a relatively lag-free experience using remote play on my iPhone. Your internet speed has nothing to do with it - even if connecting outside you local network you realistically only need 10mbps of bandwidth, even that. Ping is the number you need to be looking at - and is ideally below 10ms. Make sure your PS5 is connected to your router via Ethernet. If you’re having problems connecting locally, upgrade to a WiFi 6 router and make sure you’re one wall or less behind the access point, set up a mesh (with a hardware backend, I use MOCA for mine) if you’re two walls or more away.
Thanks for the advice - we do have a mesh network already, but I can’t hardwire the console due to the distance from the router (same room, but opposite sides). Ping is usually single digits, but I’ve still found even with a small number, latency can be a bit hit-or-miss. I’ve tried configuring settings to make things smoother, and I seem to have found some kind of sweet spot where drop-outs are less frequent, but there’s still times where it just refuses to work properly. Or even at all sometimes.
I’ve seen in some preview videos that the Portal uses a “better” version of Remote Play due to how it’s been made, which swayed me in my decision to get it. With what you’ve said though, I may hold off until reviews come out before taking the plunge. Thanks again for your tips.