When the Razer Edge cloud-gaming handheld shipped earlier this yr, it included a higher-end model of Razer’s $100 Kishi V2 — an on-phone recreation controller eerily just like well-known competitor the Spine One. Now you may get the $130 Android-only Kishi V2 Professional controller by itself, in one among two variants: the usual model and a specifically licensed Xbox Version that features — anticipate it — an Xbox button below the correct joystick for an additional $20 (accessible solely in North America).
The Professional fashions provide two options you possibly can’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 recognized lately as “haptics”).
So, yay for the three.5mm jack, which works as anticipated, however I am not an enormous fan of Razer’s HyperSense audio-based haptics. For many video games, it is not primarily based on cues within the recreation, it is primarily based on sound frequencies, so that you get some bizarre vibrations. Right here it is even weirder, as a result of there’s so little bass within the cellphone’s sound system (a minimum of in my Samsung Galaxy Extremely S22), so, for example, background music vibrates and nothing appears like a rumble.
The design is in any other case the identical. It comes with extra rubber tabs you possibly can slide in at both finish to supply a extra comfortable match or elevate the digicam bump barely so it would not press towards the again help, however I have a tendency to search out that makes it tougher than I wish to snap within the cellphone.
A 3.5mm jack (left) joins the for-charging-only USB-C port (proper).
Lori Grunin/CNET
Razer up to date its Nexus app together with this rollout, and I am nonetheless not loopy about it. As an illustration, reasonably than realizing I am signed in to Xbox Sport Cross by way of 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 when you exit a recreation or the app unexpectedly — say, when it is attempting to throw you out to Chrome however the message would not have an choice to cancel since you preserve forgetting it would not deal with Sport Cross login appropriately — it loses the connection to the controller. Then you must disconnect and reconnect it bodily, as a result of there is not any method to pressure a connection refresh in software program. That is not the solely scenario during which the cellphone 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 am glad to see the devoted audio jack within the Professional, it is nonetheless extra irritating than I might like in some methods. Perhaps V3 would be the attraction.