abxylute S9 vs Backbone One vs GameSir X5 Lite: Which Phone Controller Should You Buy?

Three phone controllers walked onto my desk, and only one of them is leaving in my bag. The abxylute S9, the Backbone One and the GameSir X5 Lite for XBOX all do the same trick: stretch apart, clamp your phone, plug into the USB-C port, and turn whatever you carry in your pocket into a handheld. I own all three. I paid for all three. The S9 has been riding with me for well over a year and a half. So in the companion video I put them side by side, price to price, grip to grip, D-pad to D-pad, and let them fight it out. This is the written version of that fight.

Two things to clear up before anything else

Because the comments keep asking, and because they change how you read everything below.

First: you do not need a subscription to use the Backbone One. Backbone would love you to think otherwise, and the app does its very best to sell you Backbone+ the moment it opens. You can decline, and the controller keeps right on being a controller. I don’t pay for it.

Second, and this one I found out while filming: the S9’s Bluetooth needs power. The controller has no battery. It pairs over Bluetooth 5.3 just fine, shows up on the phone like any other gamepad, and the second you pull the phone out of it, it dies. The way to actually use it wirelessly is to run a USB-C cable into it for power, then pair it to a phone or tablet that’s docked somewhere, maybe mirrored to the TV. So yes, it has Bluetooth. With an asterisk the size of a power cable.

Okay. Now the three of them.

What are these three, and what do they cost?

Same idea, same kind of controller, three different prices, and honestly three different philosophies. None of them has a battery. All three have analog triggers, all three pass USB-C charging through to the phone, and all three work with an iPhone, although only two of them are licensed to, which matters later.

The Backbone One is the slim, polished, famous one. Mine is the USB-C 2nd gen, which is the current One, and it is emphatically not the Backbone Pro, the bigger Bluetooth model with a battery that I’ve written about separately. The One launched at $99.99, which is reported rather than something I watched happen. These days the regular price is $79.99, and it goes on sale constantly. I got mine for $60. Hold that number.

The GameSir X5 Lite for XBOX is the 25th Anniversary Edition, translucent green, $44.99, and the one I unboxed earlier this month. There is a regular X5 Lite for $34.99, and you want to know the difference before you save the ten bucks: the regular one’s triggers are on/off switches. The XBOX edition’s are analog, so they read how far you squeeze, which is the whole point in a racing game. Both have Hall effect sticks. The XBOX edition also throws in a travel case and a month of Game Pass for new subscribers. For ten dollars more, it is simply the better one of the X5 series.

The abxylute S9 is the big one, from the same company that makes the N6, which I’ve called one of my favorite Switch 2 controllers. It started on Kickstarter in 2024 and reportedly launched at $99. You might still catch it at $100 now and then, but about $63 is what it goes for on the regular. I bought mine for about that on Amazon a while ago.

So: $45, about $63, and $60 if you’re patient with the Backbone. All three within $20 of each other on a normal day. Keep that in your head, because it means the decision is about what you want, and almost never about what you can afford.

Will it fit my phone, my case, and my iPad mini?

Phones first, because that’s the easy part. All three take my phone in a thin case without a second thought, and a thicker case pokes out a little past the lip but stays put. Two things to check on your own case: how deep the well around the USB-C port is, because the Backbone’s plug is the shortest of the three and might not reach the bottom of a deep one, and whether your case has a rubber flap over the port. The flap is an obstacle on all three.

Now the fun test. I don’t own a gaming tablet, but my iPad mini is about the size of a RedMagic Astra or a Lenovo Legion Tab Y700, so it stood in. The GameSir stretches to 213 millimetres and grips the iPad mini fairly well. The S9 goes to 216, so same story. Three millimetres apart, both comfortably enough for the gaming tablets out there. Without a case, both of them hold the tablet at a slight angle, because the side with the USB-C plug can’t sit flush against the back while the other side does. I think a case would square that up, since the clamp is clearly designed with one in mind. One more thing worth knowing: the GameSir’s plug wiggles up and down. That’s not a defect. It’s there so the plug can follow the angle you slide your device in at instead of levering against the port.

And the Backbone? I stretched it as far as it goes. That’s it. That’s as far as we go. The Backbone One caps out at a phone, so if a gaming tablet is anywhere in your plans, it’s out of contention before the race starts.

How heavy is the abxylute S9, and how do they feel in the hand?

Out came the kitchen scale. GameSir: 143 grams. Backbone: 137 grams. Practically twins, and both very lightweight. Then the S9: 250 grams. I’m just going to round it and call it 100 grams heavier than the others, because that’s what it feels like. For the record, abxylute’s own spec says 250 g, GameSir’s says 145 g, and Backbone doesn’t publish a weight for the 2nd gen One at all. With my phone clipped in, the S9 package came to about 500 grams, still very reasonable next to the handheld PCs that have been crossing my desk lately. And remember where the weight goes: rumble motors, Bluetooth, replaceable D-pads and sticks, full-size grips. It’s heavy because it’s full.

Grips, then. The Backbone’s are flatter, a little curvier than a Joy-Con, but flat and slick in the hand. They give you something to hold, barely, and that’s by design. The Backbone is built less for grip and more for portability, the thing you toss in a bag without thinking about it. The GameSir has a small flare at the back, so my fingers cup it naturally, and that small flare makes it a good deal more comfortable than the Backbone. The S9 has the full-size grips with the same flare, and these ones are actually grippy, in the sense that the material grabs back. I can hold it firmly, and with a small shift my middle fingertips land on the back paddles.

Then there’s the right stick, which on the two small controllers is a bit of a squatter. On the X5 I have to keep my thumb curved, because if I flatten it the stick is immediately in the way. On the Backbone it’s straight up in the way, pretty much under my thumb, so I end up playing sideways or arched. The S9 still brushes it if I lay my thumb flat, but there’s more real estate, so it bothers me less. All of that is with medium-sized hands. If yours are larger, I’d expect you to have an issue with all three.

Which ones have Hall effect sticks? Does the Backbone One?

The GameSir and the S9 do, sticks and triggers both. The Backbone One doesn’t claim Hall effect anywhere on its product pages, so the answer is no. Its triggers are analog, though, like the other two, so all three will ease you onto the gas in a racing game.

Hall effect, if the term is new to you, means the stick’s position is read by a magnet instead of a sliding contact, so there’s nothing to wear down and drift over the years. The S9’s sticks are also the only full-size ones here, and they push back a little more than the GameSir’s and the Backbone’s. Not stiff, just resistance, and that resistance is exactly what you want when you’re nudging a crosshair in a shooter. There are two taller stick caps in the box if you want more throw.

The buttons took me a while to describe, and I landed on keyboards. The Backbone’s face buttons are blue switches: clicky, and very audible. The GameSir’s are brown switches, tactile without the noise. The S9’s are tactile too, and quieter still than the GameSir’s, which makes it effectively the quietest of the three. If you play in bed next to someone who’s asleep, you now know which one to buy.

Is the abxylute S9’s D-pad really that bad?

Three D-pads, three stories. The Backbone’s gets a lot of praise for not throwing stray diagonals, and the praise is earned. It’s a membrane pad, it takes a little pressure, and it feels nice, honestly. The GameSir’s is membrane as well, accurate, and simply easier to press. It goes down easy. The S9’s sits between the two in effort, and it ships with three of them in the box, a cross, a disc and a hybrid, so you can swap to taste.

And the S9’s has a known problem, which I’ve read about and confirmed myself: press it too hard and it registers diagonals you didn’t ask for. Contra is the example that lives in my head. I press down, the game reads down and right, my character strolls sideways into a bullet, and I lose a life for a direction I never pushed. In the video I put Streets of Rage 4 on it and reproduced it on camera, pressing down, then pressing down hard, and watching him wander off. The twist is that for fighting games this is actually good. The Hadoukens and the Shoryukens come out easier on it than on the other two. But in any game where down has to mean down, the Backbone does a better job, and the S9 is the one that will occasionally betray you.

Does the abxylute S9’s headphone jack work on iPhone, and what else does it do that the others can’t?

The extras are where the S9 runs away with it, so let’s go through them.

The headphone jack. Only the S9 has one. Headphones, or a 3.5 mm cable out to a speaker, and your game audio comes out of the controller instead of fighting your phone’s busy USB-C port. I do appreciate that. Here’s the catch: it doesn’t work on an iPhone. The Backbone and the GameSir are certified Made for iPhone, so an iPhone sees a Backbone and a GameSir. The S9 isn’t certified, so it introduces itself to the iPhone as a DualSense, a PS5 controller. That works, and it works well, but the iPhone now believes it’s talking to a PS5 controller, and that beautiful 3.5 millimetre port goes quiet. On Android it works excellently.

Which mode you’re in matters too. Hold the M button and the Home button for a second or two and the S9 changes what it pretends to be, and the light tells you which: purple is PlayStation, blue is Xbox, red is Switch and green is Android, per abxylute’s manual. The jack works in the Android mode, which happens to be the one I use for all my emulators.

And to close the loop on a question I know is coming: no, the Backbone One doesn’t have a headphone jack. Mine doesn’t, and Backbone’s help center says Ones bought from August 1, 2026 dropped it. The GameSir doesn’t have one either. If a jack matters to you, this comparison just got very short.

The back paddles. Two of them, remappable in the abxy app, and a lot of you have come to appreciate having paddles. I get it. The other two have none.

Motion aiming. The S9 has a gyro, and in the app you choose the axis, up and down, left and right, or both, and whether it’s always on or press to trigger. Always on is chaos, because every twitch of your hands moves the aim. So I set press to trigger and map it to one of the back paddles, and that’s how I’ve used it: press the paddle, tilt to aim, press again to turn it off. The other two don’t offer any of this.

Rumble. The S9 has it, the basic kind, two classic weight motors rather than anything HD. You set the strength by holding M and pressing up or down on the D-pad, through off, low, medium and high. The GameSir and the Backbone don’t rumble at all.

Do you need a Backbone subscription, and are the apps any good?

No subscription needed, as covered up top. Backbone+ runs $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year in the App Store, and you can ignore it entirely and still play.

As for the apps, honestly, I don’t use them much on any of the three. GameSir’s is a means to an end: firmware, a gamepad test, dead zones, done. abxylute’s handles firmware and remapping plus the motion and rumble settings above, and tries to be a little bit of a front end on top. Backbone’s is the full ecosystem, a games hub that integrates into your phone, and it asks you to sign in immediately. If that’s your thing, the Backbone genuinely presents a better proposition. It isn’t mine. My Android phone is set up for emulation, and a premium subscription on a mobile application provides very little value to me. If you pay for Backbone+ and love it, tell me in the comments what you like about it so much. I’m trying to understand.

The specs, side by side

So who is each one for?

First question: are you even in the market for one of these? If you’ve read this far, you either are, or you’re curious, or you’re avoiding work, or you’re in the bathroom. All of those are fine. Whatever you’re doing, that’s fine.

Which one is right for you is subjective. I’ve given you the facts, and here’s my opinion. I personally prefer the abxylute. I used to travel with it before I had my AYN Odin 2 Portal, before I went down the rabbit hole of buying Android handhelds, and it earned its place for all the features above. It just has extra for $63. One honest footnote: the Odin has largely replaced phone emulation for me, so the S9 doesn’t come out as often as it used to.

If you want the lightest, cheapest one that still has the good parts, that’s the GameSir X5 Lite for XBOX at $45, and spend the extra ten over the regular model for the analog triggers. Greater portability for $45, and a travel case to put it in.

And the Backbone. I’m not telling you to skip it. If you prefer its ergonomics, and a lot of people do, that’s absolutely fine. I respect it. You do you. It’s the most portable of the three, it’s certified for iPhone, and the app is robust even if it keeps trying to upsell you. Just buy it at $60. Wait for the sale. $60 is the only way you should ever buy this.