Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsPerfect for what it is designed to do.. stream games from your local consoles.
Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2022
All these reviews about this device being underpowered for emulating are really missing the point of this device. This is really a switch like controller that runs android so it can run remote play apps or cloud gaming apps (though much more comfortable to hold then a switch with better battery life.) if you want a device that can do emulation and full console gaming but portable you will definitely want to look elsewhere for something like a price subsidized steam deck, or Retroid device or any of the other smaller emulation designed devices would better suite you.
I however was looking for a high quality, portable sturdy second screen with good controls and good battery life which 12 hours is hard to beat. (Yes you can do with with an iphone / ipad or android phone / tablet but if you have tried that like i have you will find the screen size to be too small with thick black bars to make a 16:9 aspect ratio that is standard with TVs or for the case of tablets too large and now sitting on a table bluetoothed to a controller.) This device out of the box (at least for xbox, playstation requires a 3rd party app called PSPlay as the Sony official app doesn’t support the g clouds controllers yet (maybe with an update to Sony's app)) will take your console and make it portable just be sure to have wifi 5 (which is the wifi spec on the g cloud) or greater as this all requires a lot of local bandwidth on your personal wifi network.
I found for the best results i had to hard wire my consoles over LAN and then to use my eero wifi 6 system as the final wireless step to the g cloud, i have had almost no artifacting, latency issues, or ghosting since switching to this setup notice i didnt say none.. just 99% perfect streaming. Even with other traffic on my network like my partner streaming movies over apple tv etc. this setup performs almost perfectly enough to think its happening on device.
I did initially try to use the PS4 pro and Xbox S on wifi, and while the xbox s’ modern wifi worked great, the ps4 pro’s was not good, downloading or updating software while trying to remote control the console would resort in artifacts and issues. I mostly blame Sony’s` wifi in the ps4 pro as even when it was connected to the tv i had issues with it. The minute i put it on LAN all those issues went away and it was as if the G cloud was directly connected to the PS4 Pro i was able to crank up PSPlay’s streaming settings to max and the gaming became buttery smooth. Microsofts Xbox App does a lot of the work for you when it comes to remote play and is frankly superior to sony’s app and even the 3rd party PSPlay (which is an improvement on the official Sony one.) The xbox app will automatically scale the graphics quality based on current wifi and other factors to smooth out the experience so, while not unusable as the ps4 pro was over wifi, it was just not a perfect experience but still playable! But, again for best results hardwire LAN to the xbox s and then wifi 6 to the g cloud for buttery smooth, full hd, no artifacting or noticeable lag while gaming.
I did try some Xbox Cloud Gaming but found that to be sorta redundant as I have a console in my home but i guess the option is nice if you don't.. however the streaming was only ok in my opinion. I have fios fiberoptic gigabit internet with wifi 6 and i still had artifacting and some lag, while playable for non timing critical games definitely not a perfect or optimized experience. It just seems at this time that game streaming from servers outside the home is just not ready for prime time in my opinion.
I think playing my consoles on g cloud is going to replace playing my consoles on my tv as I prefer the handheld form-factor and casualness of just picking up and playing like the switch but the graphics of the better consoles really pop on the 7” screen which is really the star of the show. The screen really is good for a LCD, the black levels are good, colors pop and it gets very bright! Hard to find something like this with this battery life.
The android version on the device is basic but the addition of tablet mode means you can multitask (something you cant do in the “console ui”) The device software in its current revision lacks screen mapping of the controls so android games will run but wont take advantage of the extra hardware buttons and sticks (this is something that can be added with 3rd party software but as I only use this as a console portable screen I have not tried this, as all the software I use is designed for the controls or has control mapping) this is apparently not good if you want to run games natively on the device but with its specs it wont really do a good job at that.
This device really has been narrowly designed for streaming games and its processor does an amazing job at that for 12 hours but your milage playing game software locally will vary (not that i have tried just seen other reviewers attempts.)
