Four years after discontinuing its last handheld gaming console, Sony is making a return with Project Q, a new 8-inch device designed to stream PS5 games

Sony first unveiled this new console at the PlayStation Showcase on May 24

Sony announced that Project Q will be released later this year, but did not give a specific date The price of Project Q has also not yet been announced

We imagine that Sony will try to release the console by Black Friday in November, making it a must-have present for the holiday season Hopefully Sony will not run into problems like the PS5 restocking

Given that the Nintendo Switch is priced at $349 and the Steam Deck and PS5 are both priced at $499, Sony's new handheld console will be priced somewhere between those two

During the PlayStation Showcase, PlayStation head Jim Ryan said the device will have an 8-inch HD screen and its buttons and functionality will be identical to those on the DualSense wireless controller

This is an inch larger than the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch, but hopefully Sony has the foresight to include an OLED display in a portable gaming device

However, according to a tweet from The Game Awards host and creator Geoff Keighley, that screen could be 1080p with a 60Hz refresh rate The best cell phone displays tend to target WQHD, but that resolution and aiming for Full HD rather than 4K should mean less bandwidth is needed to stream graphics to Project Q

The limited information released by Sony confirmed some earlier rumors about the handheld device, but not much else

We also saw rumors that battery life might be a shocker: according to Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming, the Project Q is rumored to have a battery life of only 3-4 hours We hope this is not true or that the price is commensurate with a handheld that can only handle remote play for the duration of an NFL game

In short, the Project Q device will allow you to stream games from your PS5 to your handheld using remote play over Wi-Fi In other words, you will need to own the PS5 console as well as the game in order to play the game, and there will be no PS Vita redux

However, the ability to play PS5 games via the cloud will help Sony compete with the Xbox Series X Given the list of titles, both current and upcoming PS5 games, this should be enough However, this is unfortunate for PSVR 2 owners, as it obviously cannot stream VR games

Having its own dedicated console to play PS5 games on the go would be a unique selling point for Sony against Microsoft, which relies on third-party devices like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally [However, since Project Q requires games to be streamed from one's PS5 to the cloud and then back to the portable console, it may have more buffering issues than games streamed directly from servers in the cloud

Also, since you can already stream games to other portable devices using Remote Play, Sony would need to explain why Project Q is a better option than, say, pairing an iPad with a DualSense controller

As we learn more about Sony's new device, we will continue to update this article to see if it is worthy of inclusion in one of the best portable gaming consoles