Problems with PS Remote Play

Tags = [ Devices, Gaming, PlayStation, PS Remote Play ]

Posted on October 28, 2024 at 11:30 +08

I've been using PS Remote Play for a while now, across a number of different devices such as Backbone One with iPhone, Chiaki4Deck on Steam Deck, DualSense® with Mac, and PlayStation Portal™. I've also used it to play numbers of games, and I thought it was time to share my experience with it.

I guess many people first experience with PS Remote Play was through the official app. In this case, you guys generally does not have san extra game controller for app. Of cource you can connect your controller to your device, but this loses the portability of a mobile phone or tablet. I won't go into detail about this original experience in this post. I will share with you several ways I play PS Remote Play myself and their pros and cons.

Backbone One

I use the Backbone One - PlayStation® Edtion with my iPhone. It solves the problem that you can only use the virtual buttons of the touch screen on your mobile phone. On iPhone you can customize the game controller buttons with its built-in settings.

And the quality of your connectivity depends on your mobile phone and router. You can choose to use a Wi-Fi 6 or even Wi-Fi 7 devices to maximinze your connection experience.

This way, you can enjoy your phone's high-quality screen and even HDR. The PS Remote Play can have HDR output if your screen supports it.

The gaming experience depends on how well you adapt to this type of controller. In addition to Backbone One, there are many other brands of mobile phone controllers on the market for you to choose from, such as LeadJoy and Razer Kishi. But they all have one common problem, that is, none of them support the touchpad.

Touchpad is a unique feature button of Sony game consoles, but we can use the screen of the mobile phone a touchpad. But is it really like that? The actual gaming experience is this:

Whenever you want to use the touchpad function, you must first tap the phone screen to activate the touchpad floating layer before you can start the operation. This means that you will hsave to hit least twice to complete the operation of tapping the touchpad once in the game. At the same time, the touchpad on the screen is also displayed in the upper middle of the screen. It is almost impossible to touch there when you hold the controller normally.

You may think that the iPhone has a function of remapping buttons, and there a share button on the controller, so can we map the touchpad to the share button? The answer is NO. At least the Backbone One does not support this. I have contacted their customer service, but they told me that these buttons cannnot be changed.

This is not very user-friendly for games that require frequent use of the touchpad, such as HELLDIVERS™ 2, which uses the touchpad to open and close the map.

Chiaki4Deck on Steam Deck

Its gaming experience is almost the same as when the phone is connected to the mobile controller But since you're using Steam Deck, this time you can map the touchpad to L4 L5 R4 R5. The only downsides might be that the Steam Deck itself is heavy and its display is mediocre.

DualSense® wich PC/Mac

In this way, the only difference is the latency. If you need to stream your game, this is a good way to help you save on capture card costs.

PlayStation Portal™

Finally we come to the device you are probably most interested in. You might have also seen many review videos about the PlayStation Protal™. Here I will pick out a few important points to talk.

First of all, its biggest advantage is that it has complete DualSense® functions, including adaptive triggers. It can give you all the experience of using DualSense®, but minus the touchpad.

As mentioned before, you must use the PlayStation Protal™'s touchscreen to complete touchpad operations. This time it displays touchpads on the left and right sides of the screen, and you can easily tap them with your thumb (still need to tap twice).

But the bad thing is that when you tap the wrong position for the touchpad, the entire screen will be covered by an overlay, which makes it inconvenient for other game operations.

Unfortunately, this device does not support Wi-Fi 6 or higher. This means that it will have at least 80ms of latency.