TL;DR
- GameMT has built an Android gaming handheld that swaps the right thumbstick for a physical knob.
- It appears that the knob can be turned to choose from one of four performance profiles.
- There’s no indication yet that the knob will be available as an in-game input.
The right controls can really make or break a game. That’s exactly what drives so many of us to pick up a dedicated Android gaming handheld — one with a full set of physical controls, instead of our touchscreen-only phones. But even then, there’s lots of ways of doing controls, with all manner of different components available for sticks, D-pads, and buttons. Today we’re checking out one of the most unusual entries we’ve seen to date, with the tease of the GameMT Pocket Super Knob 5000.
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Yeah. Let that name sink in for a second: Pocket Super Knob 5000. Retro Gaming With Deadfred shares some promo materials for the GameMT handset over on X, revealing features like a 5-inch 1080p display, Hall effect thumbstick, and a MediaTek Helio G85 processor. That’s an older chip that doesn’t promise a ton of performance, but we’ve seen it work on lower-end gaming handhelds before, like last year’s MagicX One35.
And then there’s the knob. Instead of a second thumbstick, the Super Knob offers a twistable knob.
This doesn’t appear to be anything like the Playdate console, which uses a crank for actual game input. Instead, it looks like this is a weirdly prominent hardware control for setting the power & performance balance. GameMT introduced its nearly identical EX5 (with a slightly different processor) late last year featuring the very same knob, here clearly depicted as toggling performance modes:
We can make that same inference from some of this new Super Knob imagery. In the middle of the three screens you see below, the four different power modes highlighted likely correspond to the four LED markers circling the knob:
Admittedly, that is slightly less interesting to our ears than some weird, new, bespoke game interface — but honestly, this does sound reasonably useful, especially if it’s able to respond to mode shifts quickly, letting gamers clearly see the impact of those changes.
The Pocket Super Knob 5000 will supposedly go up for sale sometime this April. While we haven’t seen any specific guesses at pricing just yet, based on this hardware we would not expect it to be particularly high.
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