Sony made a surprise update to the PS Portal today, enabling PS Plus Premium cloud streaming on the device.

This effectively transforms the Remote Play peripheral into a full-blown handheld, although it comes with some caveats. First, you’ll obviously need a PS Plus Premium subscription, which costs £120/$160 per year. You’ll also be limited to selection of approximately 120 games, and PS5 titles are the only ones available.

With all that said, we tested the feature out and were seriously impressed. For full clarification, we have a 200mbps connection, and were testing close to our router. Nevertheless, games loaded in under a minute and were fully playable, with no noticeable latency. We did encounter a couple of very minor graphical glitches, but nothing that ruined the experience.

In general, if you haven’t used it for a while, PS Plus Premium cloud streaming has quietly come a long way, and while it’s not quite the best solution on the market, it’s definitely right up there. Of course, whoever’s your service provider, cloud streaming comes with issues that are inherently tied to the technology; you absolutely need fast Internet and a very stable connection to get the best results.

This is still a great value add for the PS Portal, though, which has proven a surprisingly successful product for Sony. The platform holder has pointed out on multiple occasions that the device has exceeded expectations, and it’s been a top-selling accessory in both the United States and Europe this year.

New features like this, which are in beta but already work pretty well, are only going to help the product’s fortunes.

[source youtube.com]