It’s not often that something you own is completely transformed overnight without you even knowing about it, but that’s exactly what happened to me. So far I’m quite disappointed with the PlayStation Portal. There are things I like about it, such as the build quality: the screen is large and vibrant, easily punching above its weight considering it’s an LCD rather than an OLED. The haptics of the DualSense are also fantastic, and it’s the closest thing to a ‘real’ controller on a wearable device. But it’s expensive and because it doesn’t have built-in storage, you can’t download games. He also couldn’t play games without being connected to a PS5 – until this week.

Instead of limiting itself to simply streaming games from a $500 console to a $200 handheld, Sony has now introduced a feature that allows owners to stream games directly from the PlayStation Now cloud streaming service. No PS5 required.

Plus, the whole process is fairly simple and, more importantly, it works great. Once you’ve signed up for the beta (which is open to anyone who downloads the firmware update), Portal owners now have the option to connect the Portal to their PS5 as before, or directly to Sony’s cloud servers. If you choose the latter, you suddenly have access to a library of more than 120 games, including Ghost of Tsushima, Resident Evil 3 Remake, The Last of Us Part 1 Remastered and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. It’s worth noting that you’ll need to have a top-tier subscription to PlayStation Plus, but $18 a month is much more attractive than spending $500 upfront plus an extra $70 per game.

Honestly, I can’t emphasize enough how impressed I am that Sony has given new life to a device I haven’t had the best experience with thus far. It’s a common complaint that the Portal works best when your PS5 is connected to the internet, but for me – and probably many others whose routers are too far away – that’s simply not an option. As such, the PS Portal was never an attractive way to play games unless I could deal with the skipped frames and noticeable lag (I couldn’t). But as I write this I’m testing Death Stranding, Miles Morales and Demon’s Souls and getting nothing but a silky smooth framerate and connection strength that’s much better than when I streamed from my PS5, which is ironic considering he still sitting less than six feet away from me.

Of course, cloud gaming isn’t new by any means. The ghost of Google Stadia is glaring at me through my office window as I type this, and Xbox has bundled its own xCloud gaming service with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. In my limited testing, the PS Portal cloud beta works about as well as either of these services.

This does not mean that the Portal is suddenly a real successor to the PSP or Vita and there are a number of things that you should take into account. First, there’s that PlayStation Plus subscription, which costs about $18 per month or $160 per year in the United States. You’re also limited to PlayStation’s library of streamable games, which includes some heavy hitters like the aforementioned Ghost of Tsushima and Demon’s Souls, but also forgettable fillers like Disney Pixar’s Toy Story 3 and My Friend Peppa Pig. Right now, PlayStation Plus’ streaming offering isn’t nearly as compelling as Xbox Game Pass, and unless Sony makes big moves in the coming months, don’t expect to be playing first-party games through PlayStation Plus at launch.

But despite PlayStation Plus’ limited games catalog, I’m loving the kind of bold experimentation with technology this update brings. Nowadays you always know what you’re getting when you buy a new piece of hardware, whether it’s a gaming console, smartphone or laptop. Detailed specifications are carefully listed and whatever feature isn’t included now is usually reserved for the upgraded version to be released in a year or two. Instead, Sony turned an existing piece of hardware into something infinitely more exciting, without so much as a whisper of the words “Portal 2.”

The fact that Portal now does near-perfect cloud streaming doesn’t matter, because the real game changer here is that this update literally turned PlayStation Portal from one thing to another. It’s a little bit of technological alchemy that’s all too rare in an age of endless hardware sequels, mid-cycle refreshes, pros, slims, and so on. While I rarely use the term “consumer friendly,” I have to commend Sony for the fact that the company tried to sell a less attractive $200 accessory to fans and decided to proactively inject it with some added value and possibly become the PlayStation ecosystem made accessible to a whole new group of fans.

Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.