Move Over iControlPad, the iPhone Game Pad Is Here

The sad fact of the matter is we’re never going to see the release of the long fabled iControlPad iPhone case, which would allow you to add a D-Pad and physical buttons to your phone.

For us jailbroken retro-gamers with an affinity for emulation, that’s pretty sad, but maybe there’s hopes: the iPhone Game Pad has now come along, adding the same functionality to the iPhone.

Unfortunately, right now, it only works with the original iPhone, with 3G and 3GS support coming soon. Double unfortunate is that, as usual, this seemingly wonderful product isn’t in the shipping phase, with its creators now looking for a manufacturing partner.

Granted, it’s understandable why iPhone accessory manufacturers both wouldn’t and couldn’t sell an accessory that depends on jailbreaking, especially if they want to keep a good relationship with Apple. Still, I hope someday one of these iPhone control pad projects gets off the ground: there’s plenty of iPhone gamers out there who miss the tactility of physical buttons underneath our thumbs.

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About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Cases, Gaming, iPhone, News |

http://www.cultofmac.com/the-clamcase-turns-your-ipad-into-a-netbook/41945 Eric Meek
i think this ruins the point of gaming on the iphone? It kills the touch experience IMO. Nice option though.
Shawn Pero
Why should it depend on jailbreaking? Wasn’t this kind of accessory specifically mentioned by Apple as being a possibility a while back?
open0source
Someone should publish standards before any of these get off the ground so that official App Store apps can take advantage of them without tons of different models requiring one-by-one support (assuming Apple would even allow this type of interfacing from the charge port.)
In fact, Apple should publish standards, even if they aren’t making them. Too bad that won’t happen.
Kae
I’m sure this can be released without advertising it as a Jailbroken dependent device, but at the same time have JB apps developed for it.
Apparently the iControlPad is being manufactured at the moment, and has been since April. We’ll see =/
@Eric Meek – I don’t think so, sure the iPhone has touch screen and tilt etc, but some games are just better with buttons. Think of the DS, plenty of great games that don’t use the touch screen or mic.