Sony has tapped accessory company Backbone to make a PlayStation-bound version of the excellent Backbone One mobile controller for iPhone, which is now available from Backbone and Best Buy. It gives off PS Vita vibes, but somehow Sony was fine with Backbone keeping the Xbox-like analog stick. The $99.99 controller, which can be opened to fit iPhones as small as the 13 Mini and as large as the 13 Pro Max, comes in a new combination of white and black, just like the PS5’s DualSense controller. Sure, it’s a more expensive solution than connecting 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 console or PS5.
It’s identical in price and design to the all-black 2020 Backbone One, which is still on sale, except for one big change: cross, circle, triangle and square face buttons in place of A, B, X and Y to match game button prompts you’ll see in PlayStation games on mobile devices. You can use it to play games on Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, and Stadia, but the button prompts won’t match what’s 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 grips, logical button placement, good trigger response, and handy features like Lightning passthrough charging and a 3.5mm headphone audio passthrough port. Additionally, its orange Backbone button doubles as the PS home button in Remote Play when you hold it down.
The face buttons look similar to the DualSense ones.
“What PlayStation games on mobile,” you might ask? Unlike Microsoft, Sony doesn’t have a robust cloud-based offering for PS Plus subscribers on phones, and we may be waiting a while for Sony to follow through on any of its promises to bring several games from the PlayStation catalog to mobile devices between now and 2025. So at launch, Sony and Backbone are banking on this controller as the surest way (other than simply pairing the DualSense with your iPhone) to play PlayStation games from your existing PS4 or PS5 console.
For the uninitiated, Sony’s Remote Play mobile app lets you access your PS4 or PS5 games while walking around your home. It sounds great and is capable of delivering a decent experience. I could load up Tetris Effect: Connected almost anywhere and have a pretty good time streaming over Wi-Fi at home, which is how I imagine most people can use Remote Play. Now you can also play Remote Play outside your home via LTE or 5G too (if this is the first time you’ve heard this news, you’re not alone) — although fast-paced games like Returnal don’t play as hot over LTE or even 5G for me. Your enjoyment may vary depending on your Wi-Fi hardware and network coverage.
I can get past the Remote Play latency, but there are some other persistent annoyances here. The orange Backbone button can be pressed and held to take you back to the PlayStation 5 home screen for switching games, which is cool. However, this bypasses the toolbar, which allows you to easily put the console into rest mode. So you’ll need to use the iPhone’s touchscreen to pull up the PS’s virtual home button and navigate to the option, or when you manually disconnect from Remote Play, you can set the console to automatically go into rest mode. This feels a little more annoying than it should be. Also worrying is that if you switch out of the Remote Play app — even briefly — you’ll have to reconnect to your console.
It could be said that this PlayStation edition of the Backbone model is Sony’s way of getting back into the mobile gaming world, much like it launched its InZone PC gaming monitor to capture some of the PC gaming market.
The release of this controller is an intriguing move, both for Backbone, a small company still dealing with its successful first product, and for Sony, which has entrusted a third-party company to make some very official-looking hardware on its behalf. I wonder if outsourcing this will allow Sony to release mobile games faster than if they were to pursue their own mobile controller instead; Sony published patents in late 2021 for a controller that looks like a DualShock 4 split in half. And maybe having a bunch of these controllers out there might finally convince Sony to launch a proper cloud gaming service on mobile.
Excited as I got myself thinking about the future, I can’t recommend that current owners upgrade just to get the PS-specific buttons unless you’re a die-hard PlayStation fan. Even for diehards, I would really question how much you love Remote Play. Currently, Sony’s strategy for mobile games outside of streaming from your console doesn’t exist.
Backbone has confirmed that this PlayStation edition of Backbone One will be exclusive to iOS. The company is working on an Android version of the One that should be released in November.
Photo by Cameron Faulkner/The Verge
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