Review: Zeemote JS1 Mobile Joystick

Cell phone games have come a long way since green lines charging helpless red dots or grinding through yet another Tetris marathon. But as far as control sets go, you're pretty much stuck with your phone's number pad or some variation of a directional-pad. We've all seen various attempts at snap-on peripherals (and maybe even experimented with the first version of the ill-fated N-gage) but while mobile gaming has grown in complexity, actual input has remained largely the same.

To the rescue comes the Zeemote JS1 mobile joystick. Borrowing a few design pointers from the Wii's nunchuk (connecting via Bluetooth instead of wires), the JS1 measures in at 3.7 x 1.4 x .8 inches. It's small enough to stash comfortably in a pocket, but with long, ungainly fingers like mine, gripping it starts to feel a little awkward after a short while. The device weighs a miniscule 1.7 ounces, including the pair of AAA batteries (they gave us about 40 hours of juice), so lugging it around will be much less of a chore than existing mobile gaming solutions.

Syncing a JS1 to a cell phone is a simple act. Switch on the joystick, turn on Bluetooth discovery on your phone, wait while they find each other, and approve the pairing. Our Nokia 6131 connected to it in under two minutes. And while a 30-foot range is overkill for cell phone gaming, you can get pretty creative with your lounging without hampering connectivity.

An Xbox 360 controller is just a fancy piece of plastic without a title like Halo 3. The same holds true for the Zeemote. As it stands, getting the JS1 working on a particular game requires incorporating the Zeemote Controller API into titles as they're developed. This means no plug and play-games have to be created with the Zeemote in mind if the controller is going to work with them. So while there are few games out the gate already-like classic Sonic the Hedgehog - there's no Snake or Tetris for you. Well, not yet at least. The unit we tested was a pre-production model, so while the games available showed off the controller's features, the limited selection will (hopefully) be expanded.

This all of course raises a fundamental question: do you like playing games on your cell phone enough to carry a controller around? Most of us don't bring a DS or PSP everywhere, but we'll certainly always tethered to our phones. And are cell phone games ever going to be fun enough to justify lugging a joystick? Even with super-phones like the N95 rivaling my desktop in terms of raw computing power, there's only so much gaming you'll be capable of cramming onto a device that is intended primarily to make phone calls.

Having spent a significant portion of my life in front of screens of varying diminutiveness, the JS1 isn't pulling me away from my DS any time soon. But its small and effective-if you need your hedgehog fix and don't want to port a handheld, then hey, a Zeemote might be for you.