Who needs a Switch 2? Razer Prio turns your phone into a portable gaming station
Retro delights await
If the Razio Prio isn’t out to make us ask 'who needs a Nintendo Switch 2?', it is at least out to gobble up some of the audience who might otherwise buy a high-end retro handheld.
Why? The Razer Prio is a physical gaming controller that hooks onto your phone, but is small enough to detach and fit into a pocket.
The pitch: it’s not that much larger than a credit card when folded up — although as you’d hope it is a good bit thicker than one. A Razer Prio measures 107 mm × 67 mm × 23 mm when folded, and weights 101g.
You kinda twist it to open up its clamshell of delights.
Despite those trim vital statistics, the Prio packs in proper gamepad-like controls. There are dual analogue sticks, a D-pad, full quartet of face buttons, a pair of bumper buttons and a set of triggers too.
The sticks are no ordinary pair either. Rather than using mechanical innards they rely on capacitive sensing — the same basic thing that powers the interaction between your finger and a phone’s touchscreen.
Sounds weird, but that means no stick drift, which can make your analogue sticks obtain a mind of their own after months of hard game grafting.
Razer says the Prio will fit on just about any phone with a screen below seven inches (and after that is it really a phone at all?), including whoppers like the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
To really understand how it works you need to have a look at the back when the Razer Prio is attached to a phone. A good chunky bit of housing extends across the back of the handset, while a band keeps the two parts together. And there are securing lips that extend over the front of the phone’s sides too.
We would have concerns about whether the Razer Prio will really stay in play during the heat of an actual gaming sessions but, well, Razer has loads of experience in this area. It makes the Razer Kishi series, which has been around since 2020 and is a larger scale controller designed to more closely mimic the style of a console pad.
But this one? Its portability is miles better.
There’s no battery in the Razer Prio to introduce latency or battery headaches either. It connects directly to your phone over USB-C, and supports both Androids and iPhones.
If you fancy some emulation-based retro gaming on the way to work, this one looks hard to beat. The Razer Prio is available now, for £99.99. Yep, it ain’t cheap but it’s not drastically more expensive than the rival Backbone One, which sells at a similar price from most retailers.
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