I decided to purchase an ipega PG-9023 game controller for phones or tablets. The game controller is telescopic so can extend to fit any tablet from 5″ upto a 10” tablet horizontally. These are available from amazon or ebay at around £30. It uses Bluetooth, also has a built in battery for power and charging is done by a micro usb connector.
I mainly brought one of these for use with emulators on android as I miss having my old Sony PSP as I love to play platform games like little big planet and also the lego games this is using the ppsspp emulator on android. Also older Nintendo N64 games (Mupen64Plus AE) and even Commodore Amiga games (Uae4all2).
Once I got the unit out of the box it feels solid even for the price, you have dual analog sticks as well as direction control, four shoulder buttons though these aren’t like a Xbox or PlayStation controller that are analog these are digital ie on or off, so no speed control when using racing games, select / home / start buttons aswell as your normal four main buttons these are marked Y, B, A, X. also you have five other buttons that are media controls play, skip forward & back aswell as volume up and down.
The right of the game controller extends out using a cog system to extend an extra 10cm, the left side extends out about an extra 5cm though this is spring mounted, so will fit your device nice and tight, you do have a flip down part at the bottom, so will stop your device from slipping down.
My tablet is the Tesco hudl 2 with a screen size of 8.3” which fits within the controller perfect, though if you had a bigger tablet with about a 10” screen the controller I think would feel a bit to wide to make it comfortable to use. A 7” tablet would be great aswell.
To setup on android was very simple as long as you have Bluetooth switched on, just hold down X & home for a few seconds and your all synced as a game controller (android 2.3+) though you can sync the controller in different modes by holding different buttons A + Home for keyboard mode, B + home for icade mode or Y + home for Y.Y key mode. Info on these modes are shown in the manual.
After first sync to switch on the controller you just hold the home button down for upto 3 seconds and will be in the mode you initially set. I have been using in gamepad mode on android 4.4.2 with no problems at all.
I have had the unit a few weeks now and all going well. I have used with android games with no problem these inc Asphalt 8 which recognised the controller straight away, and to be honest does work great even though the tilt control on this game is good anyway, does seem to give more control. Have also used on some basic platform games ok.
But for the main reason for buying this was for the emulators within the PSP and N64 emulators you can configure the controller buttons to suit the button layout of the original controller and this works great. The battery pack according to the user manual should last upto 20hrs use, I would say this is about right, charging through the pc took around 1-2hrs for a full charge, so the battery should be ok for most people.
Even with the distance between the two parts of the controller it does feel comfortable in your hands, I have been happy so far with the controller and works as I needed as using emulators with older games the on screen buttons just don’t cut it and using a physical controller make the games a lot better to play, so now I can relive and complete some of the older games I wish could get on android mainly the original lego games. So for the price which is the same as a normal console controller it is well worth it.
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