Sony may working on a PlayStation-like controller for smartphones. A patent has surfaced online which shows two controller grips coupled to a device — which looks to be a smartphone. Apart from this, not much is known about the smartphone controller as of now. By the looks of it, the controller resembles the layout of the PlayStation 4’s DualShock controller. Back in 2012, Sony launched the Xperia Play smartphone that got dedicated Dual Shock style gaming controls along with six axis motion controls.

The patent for Sony’s smartphone controller with a PlayStation-like design was first spotted by Video Games Chronicle, and allegedly filed by the company’s Japan division. As mentioned earlier, the controller has a design more similar to PS4’s DualShock controller than PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller. The controller is described as “a left side grip portion and a right side grip portion gripped by the left and right hands of the user.”

As per the drawings of the controller in the alleged patent, it includes “a shaft portion that can be tilted by the user, and detect the tilting direction and tilting amount of the shaft portion.” If such a device is launched in the future, it could be used with a smartphone to play PlayStation games either via Remote Play or the cloud. It could function similar to how third-party controllers are used to stream and play Xbox games. However, players can still connect their regular PlayStation controllers to a smartphone using Bluetooth. As always, note that patents don’t necessarily translate into production models, and the company is merely expressing its interest in the potential technologies described by the patents.

As mentioned earlier, Sony launched the Xperia Play smartphone. The gaming smartphone’s 4-inch (853×480 pixels) screen slides to reveal DualShock controller-like buttons. The Sony Xperia Play is powered by a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S2 aka MSM8655 SoC that is paired with Adreno 205 GPU and 1GB of RAM. It has 400MB of onboard storage that can be expanded via a microSD card (up to 32GB). At the back, it houses a 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash.

Sony preloaded the Xperia Play with 6 games and 70 other games could be downloaded from the PlayStation Pocket Store. The smartphone, at launch, ran Android 2.3 Gingerbread.