Sony's new PlayStation Portal has built-in storage, but only in Japan

Sony is giving its PlayStation Portal a new trick: internal storage. The catch is that, for now, only players in Japan can buy it.

The new model is called PlayStation Portal Player Midnight Black (Japanese Only). It goes on sale in Japan on 10 December, and pre-orders open on 13 November.

What happened?

The price is 39,980 yen, roughly 253 dollars. Everyone who buys one gets a month of PlayStation Plus Premium, Sony's top subscription tier, as a gift.

The big difference from the current model is the built-in storage. Sony says it is meant for future features. It has not said how much space there is, and it has not confirmed that you will be able to download games or play offline.

The name is changing too. The original PlayStation Portal Remote Player becomes simply PlayStation Portal Player.

Everything else stays familiar: an 8-inch 1080p LCD screen, 60 FPS, 3D Audio, haptic feedback and adaptive triggers taken from the DualSense controller.

Who can actually use it?

This one is strictly local. The device only supports Japanese as its system language, and you need a PlayStation account registered in Japan to use it.

Sony has not said whether a storage model will ever reach other countries.

What came before?

Sony launched the Portal in November 2023 as a handheld for streaming PS5 games over Wi-Fi. In November 2025 it added cloud streaming, so PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers could play supported PS5 games without owning a console.

Why now?

The handheld market is getting crowded. Nintendo's Switch 2 sold 6.49 million units between April and September 2026, down 37 percent from a year earlier. Valve's Steam Deck and the ROG Xbox Ally line, including ASUS's ROG Xbox Ally X20 released in October, are competing hard, and Lenovo and MSI have joined in.

The storage change suggests Sony wants a bigger share of that market. What it will actually do is still the open question.

What's next?

Pre-orders start on 13 November, and the device arrives on 10 December. Until Sony explains the storage, it remains a promise rather than a feature.