Review: PDP Cloud Media Remote for the PlayStation 4

• November 11, 2018
• James Skemp
• review

The following is a review of the PDP Cloud Media Remote for the PlayStation 4, received as part of the Amazon Vine program.

Fine for the Functionality it Provides

With the PlayStation 4 Sony hasn’t made it very easy to pick up a dedicated remote for the system.

With the PlayStation 3 Sony had a branded PlayStation 3 remote that was quite good, for a fairly reasonable price. With Sony’s push to have the PlayStation 3 be a household’s first/only Blu-ray player, a capable remote was required.

However, with the PlayStation 4 there hasn’t been a very good remote control for the system, with Sony using third-parties to release remotes.

PDP is one of those third-parties, and the PDP Cloud Media Remote for PS4 is one of their options.

The first thing to note about the controller is not that it doesn’t include batteries, but rather the size and number of options on it. While it has all of the core buttons a PS4 controller should have (minus two control sticks), it doesn’t have many of the controls you’d expect to find on a full remote, such as numbers, additional menu options, channel controls, or a mute button.

However, if we ignore for a moment all that we associate with the ability to control a TV, and instead focus on what TV watching has become in the age of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, and the like, we see that we actually have a few more options than an Amazon Fire Stick remote, for example. So if we limit our thinking to exclude channel surfing, it’s a capable remote.

Setup was fairly simple, with no problems of note. The remote does include batteries (as opposed to a built in battery charged by USB), and doesn’t include them in the package, but quite realistically we’d be looking at replacing the batteries a short time after heavy use of the remote anyway, and I think the average media consumer would rather have batteries that can be swapped out than having to worry about plugging the remote into a charging cable.

With that said, after I got it setup I rarely went back to actually using the remote. For actual game playing, there’s no benefit to having the remote when you may only need to switch the TV and PS4 on, and the input on the TV. When that’s the case, when you do happen to use a service, how often are you really going to grab another remote? Personally, that rarely happened for me.

So while the PDP Cloud Media Remote for PS4 is fine for what it is, without the added functionality from older remotes there’s nothing that set it apart from just continuing to use the PS4 controller when I moved past game playing.

For these reasons I’d give it a neutral rating of three of five stars. I’m sure it has an audience, but personally when the PS4 is primarily a game machine for me, I’ll just continue using the controller instead.

• review