When the most recent PlayStation Portal update dropped, I was excited about the possibility of finally being able to bring my PlayStation Portal everywhere and play games like Astro Bot, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Blue Prince on the go. However, the wind was quickly taken out of my sails during a recent trip to McDonald's. Though my fries were crisp and salty, the Wi-Fi was not, and my PlayStation Portal flatly refused to connect to the restaurant's free Wi-Fi due to some authentication issue I couldn't figure out how to bypass.
Frustrated, my attention turned to the iPhone in my pocket, with its hotspot capability. Surely I could connect my PlayStation Portal to my phone and take advantage of an always-on connection that's permanently in my pocket. Unfortunately, when I tried to connect my PlayStation Portal to my iPhone I was once again greeted with error messages and connection issues.
Frustrated, I took to the one place where I knew I could get solid troubleshooting advice: Reddit. And fortunately, after some scrolling and a very informative YouTube video I found a cheat code that let me actually use my iPhone to finally unlock the portable capabilities of my PlayStation Portal and fulfill my dream of being able to play PS5 games in the car, at the beach, and perhaps most importantly, at McDonald's.
It all starts with your phone's hotspot settings
Get those special characters out of there!
Like many people named Amanda with an iPhone, my device had the very clever and unique "Amanda's iPhone" for an SSID, and a password that was full of asterisks and exclaimation marks. Unfortunately, these security features seemed to be having some kind of effect on my ability to connect to my phone's Wi-Fi, so I changed both my phone's SSID and password to specifically exclude any special characters or spaces.
If you have an iPhone, you should also take the additional step of going into your Phone's hotspot settings specifically and toggling off the Maximize Compatibility option as this can also interfere with your device's ability to connect to the PlayStation Portal.
Time to get technical with your PlayStation Portal
This part is annoying but I promise it's worth it
Though you may be able to connect easily to your home network with your PlayStation Portal, connecting to your phone's hotspot may not be so easy. If you can't use the automatic settings to connect to your phone, here's the process that I followed to get my connection to my phone working and stable enough to play games.
- Open your PlayStation Portal's Network Settings and then select Set Up Internet Connection.
- Scroll all the way down until you see the little plus sign that says Set Up Manually. Tap it.
- Put in the exact name of your phone's SSID (name) under Network Name. Take care not to add any additional spaces before or after the name.
- Select WPA-Personal/WPA2-Personal as the security method.
- Enter your password in the Password field.
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Change IP Address Settings to Manual and enter the following:
- IPv4 Address: 172.20.10.5
- Subnet Mask: 255.255.0.0
- Default Gateway: 172.20.10.1
- Primary DNS: 172.20.10.1
- Leave the secondary DNS blank and leave Proxy Server as Don't Use.
- Make sure Connect to Hidden Menu is toggled on.
- Go back to your phone and make sure your hotspot is on and discoverable.
- Press Done on the PlayStation Portal. It may take a few minutes but you should be connected to your phone shortly.
Now that your settings are saved you should be able to use your PlayStation Portal to stream games anywhere you go, even if there's no Wi-Fi. Just always make sure that before you start playing your phone is in Discoverable mode as it won't connect to your phone automatically like it does with your home Wi-Fi.