When the Razer Edge cloud-gaming handheld shipped earlier this 12 months, it included a higher-end model of Razer’s $100 Kishi V2 — an on-phone sport controller eerily just like well-known competitor the Backbone One. Now you may get the $130 Android-only Kishi V2 Pro controller by itself, in certainly one of two variants: the usual model and a specifically licensed Xbox Edition that features — await it — an Xbox button below the correct joystick for an additional $20 (obtainable solely in North America).
The Pro fashions supply two options you’ll be able to’t get for the additional bucks: a 3.5mm audio jack, which implies now you can use a wired headset and cost on the identical time, and rumble help (buzzwordly identified today as “haptics”).
So, yay for the three.5mm jack, which works as anticipated, however I’m not an enormous fan of Razer’s HyperSense audio-based haptics. For most video games, it is not based mostly on cues within the sport, it is based mostly on sound frequencies, so that you get some bizarre vibrations. Here it is even weirder, as a result of there’s so little bass within the telephone’s sound system (not less than in my Samsung Galaxy Ultra S22), so, as an example, background music vibrates and nothing looks like a rumble.
The design is in any other case the identical. It comes with extra rubber tabs you’ll be able to slide in at both finish to offer a extra cosy match or increase the digital camera bump barely so it does not press towards the again help, however I have a tendency to seek out that makes it harder than I prefer to snap within the telephone.
A 3.5mm jack (left) joins the for-charging-only USB-C port (proper).
Razer up to date its Nexus app together with this rollout, and I’m nonetheless not loopy about it. For occasion, reasonably than realizing I’m signed in to Xbox Game Pass through its app, it at all times tells me that to allow haptics for it I’ve to launch Chrome and allow a browser setting that is not there and tries to make me play in Chrome.
And should you exit a sport or the app unexpectedly — say, when it is making an attempt to throw you out to Chrome however the message does not have an choice to cancel since you maintain forgetting it does not deal with Game Pass login appropriately — it loses the connection to the controller. Then you need to disconnect and reconnect it bodily, as a result of there is not any technique to drive a connection refresh in software program. That is not the one scenario by which the telephone stops recognizing it, both.
So whereas I proceed to love the Kishi V2 line for the crisp controls and simple in-and-out, and I’m glad to see the devoted audio jack within the Pro, it is nonetheless extra irritating than I’d like in some methods. Maybe V3 would be the attraction.