PlayStation Portal tips: 5 settings to adjust right away

By Billy Givens Published January 18, 2025

So, you’ve got a brand-new PlayStation Portal and are looking forward to the hours and hours of fun you’ll have using its Remote Play functionality to play your PlayStation 5 games. Well, yeah, you should be excited — it’s pretty rad, after all. But when you first dive in, you may want to take a look at some of the device’s settings to be sure things are set up exactly how you like them. Here are five settings we recommend adjusting on your PlayStation Portal.

Controller vibration can be a cool feature, but not everyone likes to feel it super strongly (or at all). Luckily, you can adjust the intensity of the vibration to meet your personal preferences.

Doing this requires you to go to Settings > Controller > Vibration Intensity. You can choose between Strong, Medium, or Weak — or you can just turn vibration off altogether.

Similarly to vibration, the trigger effects from the PS5’s DualSense controller are available on the PlayStation Portal’s triggers. This can add immersion in some games, but it can also be frustrating if you’re not the type of person who wants that extra layer of realism to your gaming.

To adjust this feature, go to Settings > Controller > Trigger Effect Intensity. As with vibration, you can select Strong, Medium, or Weak. You can also just turn it off completely (which is probably the best choice for a lot of players).

If you’re the type to sit your Portal down for a bit and possibly forget that it’s on, you’ll want to ensure that it enters Rest Mode. This keeps it from consuming too much power (and therefore draining your battery faster) when you’re not using it.

You can do this by going to Settings > System > Battery > Set Time Until Entering Rest Mode and then choosing how long you’d like it to wait before entering Rest Mode. We’d recommended 1-2 minutes, but hey, it’s your battery!

The light bars that run along each side of the controller look pretty cool, but they can be distracting for some folks. If you’re finding them annoying (or want to save a little extra battery life), you can disable them altogther.

To do this, head to Settings > Display and Brightness > Brightness of Lightbar and select the only other setting, which is “Off.”

Speaking of battery life, the PlayStation Portal defaults to simply showing you a battery indicator in the top right corner consisting of 1-3 bars. It’s not a very clear indicator of just how much battery you have left, so we’d highly recommend turning on the battery percentage setting to get a more accurate reading of your battery life.

If you want this on, go to Settings > System > Battery > Show Battery Percentage and toggle the button next to the text.