PlayStation has almost, nearly, quite possibly released the best update for the PlayStation Portal, but we lowly South Africans won’t get to experience it.
The latest patch for the PlayStation Portal was announced just a few hours ago. It will include a few new upgrades, the first of which we will receive. Some audio experience refinements, including speaker audio output adjustment to make the volume lower when the audio level is set to a minimum, and you will now be able to adjust the settings of your PlayStation Link device from the PS Portal Settings menu, allowing you to optimize the volume and sidetone volume.
That’s all good and well, and it was nice to see the settings menu grow a little larger once the update had finally been downloaded.
The second upgrade from the patch, which we don’t get here in South Africa, is a feature the PlayStation Portal should have released with. If you’ve not already guessed, it’s Cloud Streaming.
PlayStation Cloud Streaming is still in beta, so only those with a PlayStation Premium account can access the service. Now, don’t go reading that sentence, as many of us at NAG HQ did, thinking your top-tier PS Plus account is PlayStation Premium; it is not. Here in South Africa, we get PlayStation Deluxe, which does not include Cloud Streaming because Sony has not (yet, hopefully) built any local servers for us to stream off of.
Sadly, this means the almost best handheld console to be released is now back to “A Really Great Device I Just Can’t Recommend, Even Though I Want To.”
Perhaps one day, we will get some Sony love, and the PlayStation Portal will shine brighter than Astro Bot’s shiny head.