Mobile gaming modified fully for me when Apple lastly opened up and allowed emulators onto the App Store a number of years in the past. Delta grew to become a part of my staple of apps and has by no means left it, with retro video games performing as an outstanding fallback when prepare delays hit or my e-book is not fairly holding my consideration.
That reliance on flexibility signifies that I’m not likely the form of gamer to cart round a gaming controller simply on the off probability I need to use it with me cellphone, and that features even fairly smooth gaming grips just like the Backbone One.
So, I used to be tremendous to check out 8BitDo’s FlipPad when it unveiled it: a gamepad that married a tiny design to the comfort of it clipping onto your cellphone, which means you want solely the tiniest quantity of house in a bag to improve your gaming expertise handily.
After every week with the FlipPad, I’m much more enamoured by the design decisions that introduced it into being, and I feel it’d simply be the right addition to a journey bag or EDC backpack.
A tiny slice of clever gaming design
The FlipPad is basically a flat controller with a hinged USB-C plug to pop into your phone’s port. Once that’s secure, the controller rests on the bottom of your screen, making the phone basically have the orientation of an old GameBoy.
It’s an ergonomic arrangement that has been improved since those days, of course but it’s also really quite proven, and it works a treat in my experience. Plus, the buttons 8BitDo has used are really nice and clicky, making the FlipPad extremely tactile and satisfying.
It’s worth paying attention to the button layout here, though, to make sure it’ll work for what you need. There’s no analogue stick here, so this is very much a gamepad that aims at the NES, SNES, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance catalogue principally, along with the many other consoles that predate analogue sticks.
It does have four function buttons at the top, two of which are the standard shoulder buttons and two of which are extra, giving you some nice customisation options. I found that Delta detected the layout perfectly, giving me the easy option to tweak my controls.
(Image credit: Future)
What Delta didn’t do, though, was move the on-screen display of my game up to account for the controller taking up the bottom of the screen. It treated the FlipPad like a normal wired controller and centred my game screen, which actually made the FlipPad cut off the bottom of it. I fixed this by tweaking the app’s settings to force the appearance of the touch button layout, which is slightly clumsy but still extremely effective.
That tiny teething problem aside, I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with the FlipPad, whether in how massively it upgrades the experience of playing GBA titles that involve quick button presses, or how tiny it is when stored in my tech pouch.
For retro gamers on the go, I think it’s a no-brainer so long as it fits your phone, and it’ll probably be a mainstay in my day pack for quite a while to come.