Hasta La Gadget!

The LG Versa VX9600 phone for Verizon Wireless lets you switch out its plain back for various keyboards and controllers. The phone comes with a QWERTY keyboard, and earlier this month a game pad became available. The game pad could make the Versa one of the top gaming phones in the world, if enough games supported it. Right now, I could only find three games which did.

The Versa game pad is a sliding back cover that, when closed, makes the Versa look like a thick candy-bar-style touch screen phone. Slide the pad down, though, and you get some old-school Nintendo-style controls: an eight-way rocker with start, select, A, B, X and Y buttons. The phone’s UI rotates into landscape mode when you slide open the pad, and the phone gets a special home screen mode with large buttons to launch your games from. The gadget doesn’t require batteries, and you can replace it with the plain back or QWERTY keyboard whenever you like.

I spent a morning with the Versa’s gamepad, downloading games off of Verizon’s deck and trying to play them. Of the 10 games I downloaded, only three worked well with the game pad: Need for Speed Undercover, Pac-Man and Monopoly Here & Now.

Playing Need for Speed with the game pad was the best driving-game experience I’ve ever had on a phone. There was none of the cramped confusion you get when you normally play action games on a phone – driving was easy and smooth. I was disappointed to find that the game didn’t make any use of the A/B/X/Y buttons, though.