Keymander 2 Mobile elevates your mobile gaming as it works

CoD Mobile To be suppose to detect that I have an external controller and just match me to others with similar hardware, but that either doesn’t work or it’s not common enough to have a real impact. I’m sure this can and will change as I move up the ranks, but for now, K2M seems to have given me a distinct, slightly unfair advantage.

The downside is that K2M feels a lot like the first generation. It’s prone to sudden disconnections with no cause or warning, it runs off of game-specific control profiles that you have to download from Kaliber’s website, and it’s not user-friendly at all .

This is a significant improvement over the previous one. In December, it took me over an hour on the phone with Kaliber Gaming tech support to get K2M working sometimes. It’s great that they decided to let me play for a few minutes without a hitch, but the rest of the time the K2M feels like a portable peripheral equivalent to grappling with an alligator.

Now, however, when playing on my 2021 iPad Pro, K2M is just a bit annoying.

The K2M is a small plastic docking station with a removable stand that is more durable than it looks and a non-slip strip along its top edge. It can comfortably hold a smartphone and not too comfortably hold anything up to a large tablet. The dock is powered by USB, although it doesn’t come with a plug, and has three USB ports for a keyboard, mouse, and PS4 or Xbox controller.

On paper, the setup is pretty easy. Connect all three devices to the dock, then download the official K2M companion app to your device. Grab one of its built-in control profiles for the game you plan to play, then use Bluetooth with the companion app to link everything. It’s messy, with a lot of wires going everywhere, but it’s pretty simple.

When this works, it’s like a magic trick. The controls are automatically mapped to what you might expect if you’re coming from a console or PC, and you can simply jump into the game of your choice without a problem.

This requires a bit of setup and some time with the manual. K2M has a a lot of shortcuts, many of which are almost mandatory, so you won’t want to leave out the instructions. The mouse in particular seems to be hard-wired to always start at a very low sensitivity setting, so you’ll need to fix that manually if you intend to use the device.

You can use one of those shortcuts to switch K2M to Office Mode, allowing you to use your mouse and keyboard to write and edit on your tablet. It was very helpful during this writing, although it has some quirks of its own.

When you change the K2M between Game Mode and Office Mode, it effectively switches the way your mobile device is connected to the dock, and switching back and forth will be a lot harder. In terms of efficiency, Office Mode works like any other Bluetooth peripheral, while Game Mode needs a companion app to work properly, and the two will never meet.

The portable KeyMander 2 can be found on Amazon or on the IOGEAR website for an MSRP of $100. It is available for purchase right now.

Although K2M works better now than when I first got it, it is not without its own problems. Connections have a habit of dying suddenly with no real cause, I have to cycle the entire device from time to time to switch it back to the device, it’s a device in my entire apartment that’s picky about age and the voltage of the power strip it was plugged into, and the whole thing felt like a spool of duct tape and a common coil that was hard to like.

The Keymander 2 Mobile is a quaint device with some genuine add-ons, but it’s messy and unstable at times. If you’re a die-hard mobile user who might make good use of an action game, especially if you’re a streamer, it’s well worth a look, but don’t be surprised if you lose a bit of time, effort and screaming to get K2M up and running.

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