Sony is releasing a black PlayStation Portal in Japan, with extra internal storage ‘for future functionality’
The device is also being renamed from ‘Remote Player’ to just ‘Player’
Sony has announced that it will be releasing a black edition of the PlayStation Portal, and that it will have more storage than usual.
As announced on the official PlayStation Blog in Japan, the PlayStation Portal Player Midnight Black (Japanese Only) console will be released on December 10, at a price of ¥39,980 ($250).
As with the Midnight Black edition of the PS5, which was announced last month and is set for release on November 19, the handheld has only been confirmed for Japan, and will specifically be a special region-locked Japan-only version.
Of particular note, however, is Sony‘s confirmation that the new PlayStation Portal won’t be exactly the same as other models, and will have extra storage.
Dataminers have estimated that the current PS Portal has around 6GB of internal storage. Because the handheld only plays games via streaming, players don’t ever have access to this internal storage – it’s used by the handheld’s custom Android OS.
In its description of the upcoming Midnight Black version of the Portal, Sony says this storage will be increasing for the purposes of unspecified future-proofing.
“The new model continues to offer the same key features of the DualSense Wireless Controller, including an 8-inch, 1080p/60fps LCD display, 3D Audio, haptic feedback, and adaptive triggers,” it says (via machine translation).
“Furthermore, with an eye towards future functionality, the new model includes additional internal storage. We will announce details about this feature as soon as they are finalized.”
While it hasn’t stated how much internal storage will be added, given that the standard Portal currently already costs ¥39,980 in Japan, and given the increasing costs of storage, it is unlikely to be a sizeable increase and will likely remain as internal storage, perhaps for new apps.
Sony has also stated that the device is no longer called the PlayStation Portal Remote Player, and will now instead be called the PlayStation Portal Player.
Some may feel this renaming is overdue – while the Portal was only capable of Remote Play when it originally launched in November 2023, two years later Sony made it possible for PlayStation Plus Premium members to stream games through its own cloud servers.
At the time of writing, a Western release of the updated PlayStation Portal Player has yet to be confirmed.
