CES 2025: MCON
There’s a lot of controllers out there for phones and MCON’s got a unique take on how to add a gamepad to your phone. Partnering with Oh Snap!, the MCON’s design utilizes a magsafe setup to attach to the back of the phone and offers up a complete gaming controller experience in a small footprint.
The unit I tried out was quickly put together for the show, but still has a pretty solid feeling. When closed up, it’s not too much larger than a modern size phone, but thicker of course. You can quickly slide out the back plate where the magnets are situated, plop your phone on it if your phone has a magnetic ring, and pair it up via Bluetooth.
A plate between the MCON controller and the phone can help adjust the location of your phone. If the ring on your phone isn’t in the exact center, this ring can help you adjust it. It’s a very, very solid connection and I was able to do some shake test and the iPhone that was being used to demonstrate it didn’t fall off even with the intermediary disk in between the two devices. The backplate can’t be adjusted yet in terms of angles, but the developers are looking to see if there’s a way to do it.
The controller layout is pretty familiar with a D-Pad on the left, four face buttons on the right, two hall effect analog sticks, and a digital trigger and bumper on each corner. The analog sticks felt fantastic. They had great tension to them and I really liked using them on the MCON.
The face buttons felt pretty good. I have no complaints about them. The D-Pad, I’ll get to in a second. It’s got a good feel, but I ran into some issues. I would have liked to have seen some analog triggers for things like racing games. But, they are easy to actuate, perhaps a little too easy.
I have a Samsung Galaxy Fold 6 and I was curious how it would feel using a much larger phone. To my pleasant surprise, it worked really well. Sticking an Oh Snap! connector on the back of my phone, I flipped it open to its full size and it securely stuck to the back of the bottom half of my phone. I didn’t do a shake test though, but I did play some Double Dragon and Mortal Kombat with it in my brief time. I was told someone brought a Huawei Mate XT, the triple screen phone and it worked on it as well.
For a good portion of my testing time, the controller performed really well. Controls were responsive even with the wireless congestion in the convention center. What’s nice is you can connect the MCON to your phone with a USB-C cable if you want a low latency experience. So if you are experiencing weird wireless issues, use a cable to connect the two together for a stable connection.
When I loaded up Mortal Kombat, that’s where I experienced some issues. But again, this is a demo unit and not everything is final. The folks behind the MCON wanted feedback to continue to improve the product until its final launch in August.
The good on the D-Pad was I could pull off fireballs without any issue right off the bat. Using Raiden and Sub Zero, I maybe missed an iceball or lighting attack 1 out of every 10 times or so and that's with me not really concentrating and making sure I do the full motion correctly. I was trying at times to see how lax I could get and still pull off the move.
I did have issues doing forward or backward jumps though. For a D-Pad that didn’t have issues on the diagonal directions going down, diagonally going up was really inconsistent. At times when I wanted to jump towards or away from the enemy, I found myself jumping straight up too many times. I was able to consistently reproduce this so hopefully the team can address this issue.
Another thing I found was I was able to too easily actuate the left bumper with how I held the MCON. WIth my index finger just resting on the sides, I was sometimes pressing it even though I didn’t know I was. When playing Mortal Kombat, I was wondering why I kept blocking when I wasn’t consciously pressing the bumper button to do so. Turns out just resting my finger on it would do this and it wasn’t completely obvious as I said. The rep and I were confused for a little bit as to why I was randomly blocking and then I finally figured it out. Again, I hope this can be addressed before the final is produced.
The extended handles provide a nice grip to make holding the controller more comfortably. You don’t have to use them as you can keep them tucked into the controller, but extending them out provides a good amount of support in your palms so you aren’t more prone to drop it or have it slip out of your hands in intense gaming situations.
MCON’s looking to get a good week's worth of gaming between charges for it and there’s some thought they might give it the ability to charge the phone when connected. Currently, the MCON does draw a little bit of power from the phone when connected by a cable to charge the MCON, but we’ll see if they offer an option to push power the other way.
Their Kickstarter’s going gangbusters and I think there’s a lot of great potential for the MCON. They just need to tighten a few things up and fix a few of the issues and they have a unique and good controller for mobile gaming.
