The new Backbone Pro could be the one controller for all your gaming

Backbone’s new gaming controller looks like it should have a phone inside. The Backbone Pro has the same basic shape as the company’s previous device, the excellent Backbone One — its two oblong halves are connected by a strip of plastic and metal that expands enough to dock your smartphone into the exposed USB-C port. The Pro is heavier than the previous model, and feels a bit more solid both to use and to pull apart, but the idea is the same.

The key difference with the Pro, though, is that you don’t need to dock a phone to use the controller. The Backbone Pro can also connect over Bluetooth to lots of other consoles and devices — Backbone calls this Wireless Mode, and the phone dock is Handheld Mode. In Wireless Mode, Backbone CEO Maneet Khaira says, the Pro can connect to everything from an Xbox to an iPad to a smart TV. And there’s more in the works.

When Khaira first showed me the new controller, he practically gushed over how much work the Pro was, despite its physical similarities to the previous model. He says this is the controller Backbone has been trying to build for years. It has two full-size thumbsticks, one on each side of the controller, plus a D-pad on the left and A, B, X, and Y buttons on the right. There are two shoulder buttons on the top of each side, and a trigger button on the inside. There’s a headphone jack and a USB-C port, and apparently enough battery to last 40 hours on a charge. Khaira told me a few times about the three circuit boards on each side, and how hard it was to get all that stuff into such a small space.

This product is as much about software as hardware, though. Backbone’s app makes the system work: it aims to be a universal library of all your games on all your devices, and attempts to remember which consoles you’re connected to, the specific control layout for each one, and where you were in each game. (Backbone even built its own emulator for playing retro games inside the app.) When it all works, you should be able to pause a game on one screen and pick it up on another without putting your controller down.

The device is compatible with lots of game-streaming services, both major mobile platforms, and many consoles and devices. But it won’t work with everything: it’s not an officially supported PlayStation controller, for instance, because its buttons don’t match Sony’s. And it doesn’t work with the Nintendo Switch, either. These are obviously hugely popular platforms, and it has always been virtually impossible to build anything that works with all the big names. Backbone will likely end up making console-specific versions of those controllers, and Khaira points out you can technically use a Backbone for PlayStation remote play, but he also seems to hope he can eventually truly support everything in one place.

Khaira’s big idea, and the one that animates Backbone’s hardware and software teams, is that the controller should be the console. Before founding Backbone, Khaira worked on gaming at Google, which had a similarly cross-platform, controller-centric idea about the future. It was called Stadia, and it is now, of course, dead. Khaira thinks Backbone is going to pull it off.

The Backbone Pro is on sale now, but the price of the thing has been a moving target for tariff reasons. The current price is $169, but Khaira warned that that could change quickly as tariffs do. No matter what, it’ll be substantially more expensive than the $100 Backbone One. That one will still be for sale, too. But Backbone hopes the new one might eventually replace it — and every other game pad you have lying around.