The new Backbone Pro could be the one controller for all your gaming

Backbone’s caller gaming controller looks similar it should person a telephone inside. The Backbone Pro has the aforesaid basal signifier arsenic the company’s erstwhile device, the fantabulous Backbone One — its 2 oblong halves are connected by a portion of integrative and metallic that expands capable to dock your smartphone into the exposed USB-C port. The Pro is heavier than the erstwhile model, and feels a spot much coagulated some to usage and to propulsion apart, but the thought is the same.

The cardinal quality with the Pro, though, is that you don’t request to dock a telephone to usage the controller. The Backbone Pro tin besides link implicit Bluetooth to tons of different consoles and devices — Backbone calls this Wireless Mode, and the telephone dock is Handheld Mode. In Wireless Mode, Backbone CEO Maneet Khaira says, the Pro tin link to everything from an Xbox to an iPad to a astute TV. And there’s much successful the works.

When Khaira archetypal showed maine the caller controller, helium practically gushed implicit however overmuch enactment the Pro was, contempt its carnal similarities to the erstwhile model. He says this is the controller Backbone has been trying to physique for years. It has 2 full-size thumbsticks, 1 connected each broadside of the controller, positive a D-pad connected the near and A, B, X, and Y buttons connected the right. There are 2 enarthrosis buttons connected the apical of each side, and a trigger fastener connected the inside. There’s a headphone jack and a USB-C port, and seemingly capable artillery to past 40 hours connected a charge. Khaira told maine a fewer times astir the 3 circuit boards connected each side, and however hard it was to get each that worldly into specified a tiny space.

This merchandise is arsenic overmuch astir bundle arsenic hardware, though. Backbone’s app makes the strategy work: it aims to beryllium a cosmopolitan room of each your games connected each your devices, and attempts to retrieve which consoles you’re connected to, the circumstantial power layout for each one, and wherever you were successful each game. (Backbone adjacent built its ain emulator for playing retro games wrong the app.) When it each works, you should beryllium capable to intermission a crippled connected 1 surface and prime it up connected different without putting your controller down.

The instrumentality is compatible with tons of game-streaming services, some large mobile platforms, and galore consoles and devices. But it won’t enactment with everything: it’s not an officially supported PlayStation controller, for instance, due to the fact that its buttons don’t lucifer Sony’s. And it doesn’t enactment with the Nintendo Switch, either. These are evidently hugely fashionable platforms, and it has ever been virtually intolerable to physique thing that works with each the large names. Backbone volition apt extremity up making console-specific versions of those controllers, and Khaira points retired you tin technically usage a Backbone for PlayStation distant play, but helium besides seems to anticipation helium tin yet genuinely enactment everything successful 1 place.

Khaira’s large idea, and the 1 that animates Backbone’s hardware and bundle teams, is that the controller should beryllium the console. Before founding Backbone, Khaira worked connected gaming astatine Google, which had a likewise cross-platform, controller-centric thought astir the future. It was called Stadia, and it is now, of course, dead. Khaira thinks Backbone is going to propulsion it off.

The Backbone Pro is connected merchantability now, but the terms of the happening has been a moving people for tariff reasons. The existent terms is $169, but Khaira warned that that could alteration rapidly arsenic tariffs do. No substance what, it’ll beryllium substantially much costly than the $100 Backbone One. That 1 volition inactive beryllium for sale, too. But Backbone hopes the caller 1 mightiness yet regenerate it — and each different crippled pad you person lying around.