While Sony has largely given up on the handheld market following the death of the now-lamented PlayStation Vita, the company is taking another swing at the PlayStation Portal. Following in Nintendo’s footsteps, Sony will release a Japan-only version of its handheld. The specs are mostly unchanged: the region-locked Portal will have the same 1080p LCD screen and will still be built around remotely accessing a PS5 to play games.
The big difference is that this version will have internal storage. Because of this added hard drive, the region-locked Portal will cost the same as the global model in Japan, 39,980 yen ($252). Like the Japan-exclusive PS5, it's in Midnight Black.
The PlayStation Portal's main selling point is that it lets users remotely stream games from their PS5 while connected to the same Wi-Fi as the console, so the base version doesn’t really need built-in storage. Adding a hard drive suggests the new version may eventually do more than stream; the product description says Sony included it “with an eye towards future functionality.” It’s unclear if that future functionality is for the PlayStation 5 or for the presumed PlayStation 6.
It isn’t surprising that Sony is releasing a Japan-only PlayStation Portal. The company previously took this approach with the PlayStation 5 , releasing a region-locked version of the console for the equivalent of $350. Much like Nintendo released a Japan-only version of the Switch 2, Sony did this to make the system more accessible to domestic customers amid the yen’s declining purchasing power.
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