5 accessories to improve your mobile gaming sessions

While many of us today have smartphones with the power to facilitate these games, the experience can always be made better using some extra accessories and tools. Today, we will look at five such smartphone accessories that should help you improve your gaming experience and make it more comfortable.

Shoulder triggers

I was personally sceptical about shoulder triggers for long after they came out, but once I actually got myself to try one of these, life has been easier in titles like Call of Duty Mobile and the now-banned BGMI. Unless you have a phone that itself comes with some implementation of shoulder triggers built in like the Poco F3 GT or the Asus ROG Phone 6, these can help you get an extra pair of quick access buttons.

These buttons can then be mapped for pretty much any control in the game, provided the button layout for that particular control can be moved around the screen, to bring them near the receptor areas of the shoulder buttons. Shoulder triggers are available as one unit with two triggers or also as two separate triggers, so you have multiple options to try out.

L-shaped USB charging cable

Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of gaming on mobile devices is charging. Yes, nobody likes to play when you have a cable attached to your phone, with the wire probably getting in your way. However, every gamer has, at some point, been in a position where they must charge their phone to pull through an intense match, probably an online multiplayer one that cannot be paused.

That’s when you need charging, and while you may not be able to get rid of the cable altogether just yet, you can ease the pain and any discomfort caused by the charging end of your cable sticking out of your phone’s bottom by investing in an L-shaped cable. L-shaped cables have a 90-degree turn right where the cable tethers to the phone, allowing users to play without largely changing their hands’ positions.

Finger sleeves

If you play competitive games that involve a lot of finger-movement on the screen, you may have had bad days where the build-up of dirt on your fingers and your screen may result in a jerk, not-so-smooth motion when aiming or moving around in a game.

This can be avoided by using something called finger sleeves or finger gloves. These are cheap yet useful investments if you game a lot and are really serious about performing your best in every match.

Cooling fan

If your phone has a good processor and all the necessary power to run big games at max graphics, but ineffective cooling, you may run into unbearably high temperatures quite quickly when playing. External cooling fans can fix that to an extent, they can simply be attached to the back of your phone and will run their fans to suck heat away from the back of your device into the open air.

However, cooling fans may not be as effective for everyone. If you have a phone with a back material that doesn’t conduct and transfer heat very well in the first place, the fan may not be able to effectively transfer heat away from the phone. The same is also true if you use a case or a skin that prevents your cooling fan from working efficiently.

Detachable gamepad

I’ve already spoken about how shoulder triggers are useful, but they only come with two buttons. What about when you need something with a little more versatility? Enter detachable gamepads. While these can be the most expensive of our list, they can also totally be worth it for the right players and the right games.

You have half-game pads like the iQOO GamePad as well as full-sized ones like the Razer Kishi. These can pair with your phone either wirelessly or directly, with you docking the phone into a gamepad’s Type-C or Lightning connector. Multiple, remappable buttons here allow you to assign each to a specific control without having to change your alignment. Just make sure the gamepad you finally think of buying actually supports the games you want to play.