alve raised the price of the 512GB Steam Deck OLED to $789 this May, and anyone staring at that number is left wondering if handheld gaming has officially priced itself out of reality. Blame the AI boom, which has data centers swallowing memory chips faster than factories can make them, leaving portable consoles to fight over the scraps. Meanwhile, the smartphone already sitting in your pocket runs native console ports and streams entire Xbox and PlayStation libraries without breaking a sweat.
Hong Kong-based abxylute solves that problem with the M5 and M6, two sliding controllers that magnetically snap to the back of your phone. Both controllers retail under $90, roughly one-ninth of a Steam Deck these days, making the math hard to argue with for anyone whose gaming happens on commutes and couches.
A slider rail from the Nokia era, rebuilt for modern phones
Sliding rails nearly went extinct when touchscreen slabs replaced slider phones, and so did most of the factories that made them. According to the company, abxylute eventually tracked down a manufacturer that once built rails for Nokia and Sony, then asked it to do something those phones never needed. A slider from 2010 only had to carry a lightweight screen half, while the M5 and M6 have to hold a phone and case weighing up to around 10.6 ounces (300g). The resulting bidirectional damped rail glides smoothly both ways, with magnets snapping it into the fully open and closed positions.
The phone attaches through an adjustable magnetic mount rated at 4,098 gf, roughly 9 pounds of pull and comfortably above the 2,500 to 3,500 gf abxylute quotes for Apple’s MagSafe. Both mounts clear camera bumps up to 0.28 inches (7mm), and the plate shifts to suit different phone sizes. Supported phones include the iPhone 18 series, Galaxy S26, Pixel 11, OnePlus 15, and Xiaomi 17, with a magnetic adhesive ring in the box for anything lacking MagSafe. Lightning iPhones sit out the M5 entirely, since that model needs a USB-C port to work.
The M5 goes wired and thin for pocket duty
The M5 began life as a DIY build by Jinjiang, an independent maker who handled the 3D modeling, PCB design, and programming himself before abxylute partnered with him to engineer it for mass production. Its connection is wired USB-C, which means no Bluetooth pairing, no battery to charge, and pass-through charging so your phone can top up mid-session. The sticks are low-profile carbon-film sliders modeled on the PSP, PSP Go, and Nintendo 3DS, recessed nearly flat to keep the controller slim.
The M5 is the slim one, plugging in over USB-C with zero pairing and pass-through charging.
A limited M5 Founder’s Edition, capped at 1,000 units, comes in translucent retro green with a customizable two-letter badge replacing the abxylute logo. Slider sticks offer less throw than full-size ones, so they favor retro titles and platformers over twitchy shooters. Weighing about 6 ounces (170g) and measuring 0.91 inches (23mm) thick with the mount, it slips into a jacket pocket easily.
The M6 packs full-size controller features into the slide
The M6 took nearly three years to develop, long enough to earn the internal nickname “little Nezha,” and most of that effort went into the controls. Its capacitive sticks, developed with component maker K-Silver, tilt 20 degrees against the roughly 23 degrees of a full-size controller stick, and they click for L3 and R3. Bluetooth is backed by a 10-hour battery.
They promised an affordable way to turn your existing phone into a high-end portable console for under $90. They delivered a pair of sliding controllers that dodge the memory chip crisis entirely while bypassing a $789 price tag. They called it a practical alternative for mobile gaming. If you are tired of watching portable console prices climb toward four figures just to play indie titles on a train, clipping a $65 sliding pad to the phone you already own is the pragmatic escape hatch the market needed.