New PlayStation handheld is real, but only Japan can buy it

The new PlayStation handheld is an updated PlayStation Portal, not a new console. It keeps the same 1080p LCD screen and the same basic job: streaming games from a PS5 over home Wi-Fi, or from Sony’s cloud if you pay for PS Plus Premium. It comes in Midnight Black, a dark finish Sony has offered before.

The big change is internal storage. The Portal on sale today was built around streaming, so it never really needed room of its own: the games run on your PS5 or on Sony’s servers, and the handheld shows the picture and sends your button presses back.

Sony has also renamed this model in Japan. It used to be called PlayStation Portal Remote Player, and the new one is PlayStation Portal Player. Losing the word “Remote” sounds minor, but it suggests Sony is moving away from pitching the device as a second screen for your PS5 and toward something closer to a handheld in its own right.

Sony says the storage was added with future functionality in mind, and that it will share more once those features are finalized. It hasn’t said what they are.

That leaves a few readings, all floated since the announcement and none confirmed:

• Video and streaming apps. Today’s Portal can’t run Netflix, YouTube or Disney Plus. Extra storage plus the new name could point to apps, or to saving media for offline viewing.
• A bigger cloud push. Since Sony added cloud play, you no longer need a PS5 to use a Portal, as long as you pay $159.99 a year for PS Plus Premium. With console prices climbing during the ongoing RAM shortage, cloud gaming could become a bigger focus for console makers.
• A trial run for the next generation. New features on the Portal could be a testing ground for the PS6, which has long been rumored to come with a handheld.

One thing to keep expectations in check: the Portal isn’t powerful enough to run PlayStation games on the device itself, and Sony describes the rest of the new model’s hardware as largely unchanged.

No. This Portal is region-locked: its menus are Japanese only, and it works only with a PlayStation account registered in Japan. Preorders there open November 13, and it costs the same 39,980 yen (around $253) as the standard Portal in Japan.

Sony has done this before. It sold a Japan-only PS5 for the equivalent of $350 to keep the console affordable at home as the yen lost buying power, and Nintendo did the same with a Japan-only Switch 2. Those regional models stayed in Japan, which is a fair hint about this one, though Sony hasn’t ruled anything out.

In the US, the option remains the existing PlayStation Portal, which first came out in 2023 at $199.99. It sold an estimated 420,000 units in the US in its first year. Reviewers liked its screen and build, but many found that even small connection problems could spoil a game session.

Much of the search interest is really about a PS6 handheld, so it helps to split what Sony has said from what leakers claim.

What Sony has said: Sony hasn’t announced the PS6 or any handheld to go with it. Its CFO said during the company’s recent financial results that development of the next console is progressing as scheduled. In June, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino spoke about technology that can be used in different forms and places, and about taking PlayStation beyond the TV in the living room.

What has been reported but not confirmed:

• Leaker Moore’s Law Is Dead has claimed the PS6 and its handheld were aiming for a window between late 2027 and early 2028, with backward compatibility for PS4 and PS5 games.
• Hardware tipster Kepler_L2 claimed in September that a handheld code-named Canis would pair 24GB of LPDDR5X memory with six AMD CPU cores and 16 RDNA 5 graphics compute units, running at 15 to 25W.
• Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter said there had been behind-the-scenes talk of Sony holding an exclusive of sorts on AMD’s RDNA 5 graphics for handhelds.

Microsoft is in the same race. A Fortune report says it plans to release a handheld by holiday 2027, with its next console following in 2028.

Not everyone thinks a handheld beside the PS6 is a smart bet. Shawn Layden, the former chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, who worked at Sony through the PSP and PS Vita years, said that backing a console and a handheld at once is so hard “you almost have to create two companies.”

His point is about money and attention. The console is the bigger business, so it wins the marketing budget, and the handheld gets squeezed. He recalled a stretch when PSP sales soared while the PS3 sold less than Sony hoped. His view is that a handheld-only next step could do well for Sony, but that no company could make a handheld and a console succeed side by side.

Today, the regular PlayStation Portal is the only official way to play PlayStation games away from your television. It suits two kinds of players:

• PS5 owners with strong home Wi-Fi, since it streams games from the console.
• PS Plus Premium members who want to stream supported games from the cloud with no PS5 at all.

It is a weaker fit if your connection is patchy, because streaming quality suffers quickly when the network struggles. Sony has improved its streaming settings over the years, which mostly helps people with fast home networks.

If you’re waiting for a PlayStation that runs games by itself, there’s nothing to buy or preorder and no official date. The next concrete moment is the December 10 launch in Japan, when Sony may finally start explaining what that new storage is for.