If we talk about portable consoles and their history, this could be summed up in a frontal ride by Nintendo against its rivals. So much so, that although we talk passionately about the Steam Deck today, the reality is that its impact on the market is almost marginal. The only brand capable of turning the tortilla around? PlayStation, who played a more than worthy role with their first portable, the PSP, selling 80 million consoles, but then failed so resoundingly with PS Vita that they ended up leaving the market to renounce it.
Is Q Lite the third PlayStation Portable?
Rumors say that SONY would have developed a device with an 8-inch screen, 1920 x 1080 resolution, a refresh rate of 60 Hz, which would be found in the middle of a DualSense controller. At first glance it would seem like some kind of portable console, however, it is not like that and it would be a device that would communicate with PS5 to receive the games via streaming on a local network. That is to say, it would be a functionality that would be very reminiscent of the connectivity between PS4 and PS Vita and the concept of Wii U.
All this makes us totally skeptical about it, although a portable would have made more sense than the PS VR 2, the reason why Nintendo merged its two product lines with Switch and SONY exited the portable market is because of the difficulty of keeping two hardware platforms competing with each other for the interest and resources of the company itself. However, what we are talking about would not stop being a peripheral for the console and, therefore, would not conflict with it.
The idea would be very simple, PS5 would render the scene at a lower resolution than usual, Full HD, and the time per frame that it would gain would be used to encode the video in HEVC and broadcast it wirelessly to PlayStation Q Lite from where we would see the action of immediately without apparent delays. So we are talking about a device that would be very cheap to build and designed around the function remote play from the desktop console. However, there is a small detail that does not add up to all this rumor.
Why do we think it could be a false rumor?
Before canceling PS Vita, SONY had three PlayStation projects in development: Neo, which ended up being PS4 Pro, Morpheus, which was the first PS VR, and Trinity, which had to be a renewed version of PS Vita and whose conceptual image taken from a patent you can find in this same article. In any case, we must clarify that it was a project patented in 2015 and that by 2017 it had already been discarded.
SONY’s idea was to create a more PS4-compatible laptop by integrating all the features of the DualShock 4 and the buttons that were missing from the original PS Vita. So they would adopt the L2 and R2 buttons in the form of triggers, the share button and the analog sticks of the desktop console with the L3 and R3 buttons when pressed. The screen had to be 1280 x 720 pixels, which was the resolution at which the PS4 GPU could encode in H.264.
Why was it cancelled? The idea of ​​streaming the game wirelessly over home Wi-Fi to a small screen when we can play it on the living room TV was never very popular and it made sense that it would be canceled due to low public interest in the idea. What’s more, with an 8-inch screen, the concept of the PlayStation Q Lite seems very unattractive and bulky to us.
