Sony introduces its first gamepad for iPhone — and it’s a Backbone One

Sony has enlisted accessory company Backbone to make a PlayStation version of the excellent Backbone One mobile controller for iPhone. It gives off PS Vita vibes, except somehow Sony was okay with Backbone keeping its Xbox-esque analog stick setup. The $99.99 controller, which can be pulled open to fit iPhones as small as the 13 Mini and as large as the 13 Pro Max, comes in a new mix of white and black, just like the DualSense controller from the PS5. Of course, this is a more expensive solution than attaching one of Sony’s controllers to your phone, but it’s a more elegant way to play PlayStation games via Remote Play, Sony’s mobile app that streams games from your PS4 or PS5 console.

It is identical in price and design to the all black 2020 Backbone One that’s still on sale, except for one big change: cross, circle, triangle, and square face buttons instead of A, B, X, and Y to correspond to in-game button prompts you see in PlayStation games on mobile. sees. you can use it to play games on Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, and Stadia, but the button prompts won’t match what’s shown on the screen unless a developer has programmed their game to support PlayStation button icons.

I spent a few hours with the PlayStation edition of the Backbone One, and it’s the same great controller as before, with comfortable handles, a logical button arrangement, good trigger response, and useful features like Lightning passthrough charging and a 3.5mm jack. headphone audio passthrough port. In addition, the orange Backbone button doubles as the PS home button in Remote Play when you hold it down.

The face buttons are similar to those on the DualSense.

“What PlayStation games on mobile,” you may be wondering? Unlike Microsoft, Sony doesn’t have a robust cloud-based offering for PS Plus subscribers on phones, and we may have to wait a while for Sony to deliver on its promises to deliver between now and 2025. So at launch, Sony and Backbone are leaning towards this controller as the most faithful way (besides pairing a DualSense to your iPhone) to play PlayStation games from your existing PS4 or PS5 console.

For the uninitiated, Sony’s Remote Play mobile app lets you jump into your PS4 or PS5 games as you roam around your house. It sounds great, and it is is able to deliver a decent experience. I could load Tetris Effect: Connected almost anywhere and have a pretty good time streaming via home Wi-Fi which is how I imagine most people use Remote Play. You can now also play Remote Play outside your home via LTE or 5G (if this is your first time) hear this newsyou’re not alone) – although fast games like Return didn’t play that hot over LTE or even 5G for me. Your enjoyment may vary depending on your Wi-Fi hardware and network coverage.

I can get over Remote Play’s latency, but there are some other persistent annoyances. Backbone’s orange button can be pressed and held to take you back to the PlayStation 5’s home screen to switch games, which is great. However, doing so will bypass the toolbar that allows you to easily put the console into rest mode. So you’ll need to use the iPhone’s touchscreen to pull up the virtual PS home button and navigate to the option, or when you manually disconnect Remote Play, you can set the console to automatically go into rest mode. That feels a little more annoying than it should be. It’s also annoying that if you leave the Remote Play app – if only briefly – you have to reconnect to your console.

You could say that this PlayStation edition of the Backbone model is Sony’s way of diving back into the world of mobile gaming, akin to launching its InZone PC gaming monitor to take a slice of the PC gaming market. .

Releasing this controller is an intriguing move, both for Backbone, a small company still working on its successful first product, and for Sony, which has entrusted a third-party company to create very official-looking hardware on its behalf. I wonder if outsourcing this will allow Sony to release mobile games faster than if it pursued its own mobile controller instead; Sony has published patents in late 2021 of a controller that looks like a DualShock 4 split in half. And maybe, if you have some of these controllers, maybe? And last but not least Convincing Sony to launch a good cloud gaming service on mobile.

Excited to have myself thinking about the future, I can’t recommend the current owners to upgrade just to get the PS-specific buttons unless you’re a diehard PlayStation fan. Even for diehards, I would really wonder how much you love Remote Play. At this point, Sony’s strategy for mobile gaming outside of streaming from your console doesn’t exist.

Backbone has confirmed that this PlayStation edition of the Backbone One will be an iOS exclusive. The company has an Android version of the One in the works, which will be released in November.

Photography by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge