Finally, a Gaming Phone With Shoulder Buttons

Gaming on mobile phones is still a bit… mixed. But these days I feel better about the platform than I have in years. Part of that is because of higher quality games like the offerings on the Apple Arcade subscription service. But also we’re seeing more interesting gaming-focused ideas on mobile hardware. Touch screens aren’t great for all kinds of games. So check out the Razer Junglecat controller instead.

One of the major innovations of the traditional video game controller was the introduction of shoulder buttons with the Super Nintendo. And now a new Xiaomi phone brings that same utility to the mobile space.

A major reason why games don’t mesh well with current smartphone sensibilities is that manufacturers just don’t want to ruin their beautiful touch screens with gaudy, BlackBerry-esque buttons. The scant buttons that do exist on these devices are tucked away into corners and sides. But that’s where index-friendly shoulder buttons already live on normal controllers. So applying that idea to phones is actually kind of brilliant.

And that’s what the new Xiaomi Black Shark 3 Pro does. As translated by Engadget, the new gaming phone sports two durable top shoulders buttons when played in landscape game mode. That doesn’t solve all of mobile game’s issues. They aren’t analog sticks. But just having any physical controls at all goes a long way toward improving playability.

Along with the buttons the Black Shark 3 Pro has impressive specs like a 7.1-inch, 3,120 x 1,440 AMOLED display, a 90hz refresh rate and a responsive 270Hz touch sampling rate, a Snapdragon 865 chipset, three camera with a 64-megapixel maximum, a headphone jack, USB-C port, 8GB of RAM, and a 5,000 mAh battery. It costs about $675. There’s a cheaper, non-Pro model as well but one of the downgrades is capacitive shoulder buttons instead of physical ones.

Here are some other upcoming Android phones worth looking forward to.



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