Gadgetory

- Sony has just surprised launched an amazing feature for Apple owners, something that PS Vita and Son Xperia owners have been able to use for a few years, but now coming to IOS, has opened up to way more people, the ability to use PS4 Remote Play. (upbeat motivational music) Now what Remote Play is, is it gives you the ability to use your phone as a way to connect to your PS4 over WiFi, it does not have to be over the local WiFi at your house, you could be just anywhere connected to a WiFi signal, as long as your PS4 is also connected and use that to play PS4 games remotely on your phone. Now if you've ever heard about this feature before, you're thinking, Oh wow, that sounds insane, it must be really hard to setup, no, not at all, it's actually extremely simple and easy. All you have to do is make sure your PS4 is updated to the latest firmware of 6.5 and download an app on your phone, which is called the PS4 Remote Play app. Once you've done that, you just have to log into your PlayStation account on your phone, make sure it's logged in on your PlayStation, make sure both are connected to WiFi and you're ready to play. So once you're all setup and connected, if you're using your phone in landscape mode, what it's gonna do is actually put an overlay of a PS4 controller on your screen, it's gonna show up, as long as you're making contact, you have the sticks in the middle, all the buttons on the sides and there's a little popup menu for things like the Share button, Options or PlayStation Home button. Now of course, a large part of how this performs is based on how good the internet connection is, both where you're playing and where your PlayStation's hooked up, but assuming both are strong enough, you can get a really smooth experience, like while I'm playing right now, not really experiencing any drops. Every now and then, with any kind of streaming play, you might see just a little bit of messing up here and there, but so far, this has been a really smooth experience. Now depending on the kind of games your playing, the controller layout of having all the buttons on the screen may not be the best way to go. There is an alternative method, if you switch over to Portrait mode, it'll actually make it to where it just squishes the entire 16x9 image up to the top and it has all the buttons beneath, so that way you're not covering the screen, it's just all a lot smaller. And if that's still not quite right for you, for instance, a game that requires you to hit a lot of buttons at the same time, shoulder buttons, that kind of thing, which isn't super-convenient on this kind of layout, you can also use a controller that I don't have next to me. - [Man] If someone can find the controller. - We're totally keeping that cut though. A controller like this, this is the Steel Series Nimbus, it is a controller they've made that is designed specifically for iOS devices. iPhones and iPads can be very fickle about what kind of controllers they'll connect to, there are certain roundabout backdoor ways you can use other controllers that you'd like to, but that takes a lot more work. If you just wanna keep things simple, you just have to find a few specific ones like this. Now what's really cool about this one, they've actually just released this clip attachment as well, so you can create a whole setup, where you can play games and it leads to a much more natural experience. Instead of having to deal with onscreen touch controls and having a really hard time doing certain button combos, this is just a much more real, natural gaming experience where you have all the buttons you need. Now there are a couple buttons missing here and there, like the PlayStation Home button or Share, but you still have access to those on the touchscreen interface, so if you ever need to use those, you just have to click right here, not a big deal. Now this makes for an amazing mobile setup with your phone, but if you want something that's a little more of a bigger screen and still portable, iPhones aren't your only option for this. The Remote Play app is also available on iPads, so if you own one, you can connect it this way, still use a controller like this or onscreen controls, I just died 'cause I wasn't paying attention, we're just gonna go ahead and reload that. The Remote Play app is also available on iPads, so if you own one, you can setup the entire app the same way we did on the phone, use a controller like this and you have a portable tabletop setup with a much larger screen and better speakers to get a much better experience. I will say that with the iPad one, because this is a whole thing where it's playing over WiFi, you notice the compression a little more, but still, having a larger image is great and if you're worried about performance, as far as things like input lag go, it's actually really, really nice. Again, this will vary a little bit based on your internet connection, but assuming it's strong enough, it's an experience that's nearly seamless, there's definitely a tiny bit of input lag, but it's so minor that as long as you're not trying to do some kind of insanely competitive game, where you need to be at your absolute peak performance, it's totally fine. It's honestly really amazing to have a function like this come to iPhone and now that it's here, I'm even surprised that it took this long for Sony to bring it out, because PS Vita owners and Sony Xperia users have been able to use it for years, I think almost four years now and there were kind of roundabout ways you could do this before, but it wasn't really efficient or something Sony wanted you to do and now that it's officially supported and works so smoothly, it's a great idea. And this is something we've talked about a few times on the channel, the idea of games reaching this streaming future. Now a lot of times when we talk about that, it's this concept of the companies having their own servers that are connecting to, it's not your own system necessarily doing it, but this is a great example of how it works, where as long as you're connected to WiFi, you're able to play your games anywhere, really, as long as the setup's available and then it gives you this kind of flexibility, not too dissimilar to what Nintendo's been doing with the Switch, except you don't have to rely on the power of it itself, it's just streaming the gameplay to something. In summation, this is cool. If you own an iPhone and a PS4, try it right now and hopefully it makes its way to Android users too.