The smartphone didn’t kill everything

When the PlayStation Portal was unveiled, some people weren’t happy. It wasn’t about how awkward it looked. It was because the Portal is an almost cartoonishly limited device.

You see, it has exactly one purpose: it’s a handheld that streams games from your own PlayStation 5 while at home. It is not a standalone handheld that has its own games like the PlayStation Vita or Nintendo Switch. It was not (at launch, anyway) a device that streamed games from the cloud. You can’t take it on the bus or a plane. It’s only meant to be used at home, where the latency is low because you’re not connecting to your PS5 across the internet. It really does just have one purpose.

It’s even more egregious when you realize that any PS5 owner already can do what the Portal does — for free. If you’ve got a PS5, you’ve got a PS5 DualSense controller. And if you’re a human being, you’ve got a smartphone. Sony has free apps for iOS and Android that will connect to your PS5 and stream games to your smartphone. Pair your DualSense controller with the phone via Bluetooth and you’re good to go. Why pay $200 for a PlayStation Portal when you can already do all that for free?

And yet people are buying the Portal. There are no official unit sales, but analyst Mat Piscatella at Circana says that it was the top-grossing game accessory of 2024 in the United States. By some estimates, it seems safe to assume it’s sold upwards of a million units. Reviewers seemed surprised by how much they liked it. And speaking personally, I agree. I use it all the time when I want to play something mindless while watching football. I love the Portal.

To me, the Portal represents something bigger, something that’s become more apparent over time: the smartphone didn’t kill everything.

The early years of the smartphone era were met with a constant refrain: the smartphone will render other handheld gadgets obsolete. Before the smartphone, people used to carry an array of devices around: a mobile phone, an MP3 player and a digital camera was a fairly common combination. But the smartphone could fulfill the functions of all three of those devices in one package. And so began the drumbeat, from pundits to analysts to executives: the smartphone will eat this entire category of devices.

Apple even outright touted the smartphone’s ability to swallow what was, then, its most popular product. When the iPhone was unveiled, Steve Jobs called it three products in one — and one of those was “the best iPod we’ve ever made.” It is not a coincidence that iPod sales peaked in fiscal year 2008, the iPhone’s first full year on the market.

And that trend carried through for other devices, too. Video cameras were a dad staple on vacations; now your smartphone does that. Consumer digital cameras used to be huge; Apple overtook Nikon to become the most popular camera brand on Flickr in 2013. And PDAs — kids, ask your parents (grandparents?) about the PalmPilot — disappeared way before that.

The smartphone wasn’t always the best device for those functions; I certainly wouldn’t say that an iPhone was better at taking photos than a digital camera in 2013. But smartphones were good enough that the tradeoff of not carrying another device was worth it. Don’t forget the old saying: the best camera is the one you have on you.

Any smartphone can do what the PlayStation Portal does for free. And yet the Portal is thriving. Why?

The Portal is a niche device with a singular purpose — but it embraces that. Instead of trying to be a general product that hits multiple use cases and scenarios, it is perfectly optimized for one thing.

Just look at it. It’s big and it’s awkwardly shaped. It is not at all the sort of device that neatly slides into a bag. But that’s the point: it’s not meant to go into a bag. So why should be constrained by that? Instead of the slim profile of, say, the Nintendo Switch, the Portal has the same bulbous handles as the DualSense controller. That makes it extremely comfortable to hold — much more than the Switch.

Yeah, I can stream PS5 games to my smartphone at any time. But that experience just isn’t as good as playing on the Portal. Smartphone screens are smaller than the Portal’s screens, and they host a constant stream of distracting notifications. And it’s unwieldy to hold a controller and a smartphone at the same time. The Portal doesn’t have those issues: the screen is very large and attached to the controls. It may only have one use, but it is perfect for that use.

You see, the smartphone did kill things — but it killed the generalist products. It killed products that did a basic job, that were priced low enough to be “good enough” for most people. Yes, those products — those basic music players and digital cameras — they were killed by the smartphone. But there is room for niche products to thrive, as long as they embrace their niche as the Portal does.

So consumer digital cameras are dead, but high-end cameras exist. iPods are gone, but we have digital players with higher quality music for audiophiles with discerning ears. Dads aren’t running around filming family vacations with their Sony Handycams anymore, but they might use a GoPro for underwater footage or a DJI Osmo Pocket for gimbal-stabilized video. E-ink screens have too many tradeoffs to be the primary display on a mass-market smartphone. But they are brilliant for one use, reading e-books, which is why the Kindle continues to sell even though it’s available as a smartphone app.

And it’s why I always scoff at the never-ending predictions that video game consoles will die out. Gamers are picky — they have specific needs that aren’t served by generalist devices like smartphones.

The PlayStation Portal symbolizes this. It is not a product with broad appeal, but something hyper-focused on doing a particular job really, really well. It is what good portable gadgets look like in the age of the smartphone.