The EasySMX X05 Pro wireless controller is cheap, feature-filled and comfortable with a big flaw

The EasySMX X05 Pro was sent over for review and after spending weeks with it, this little device nearly turned into a favourite.

Let's get all the good bits out of the way first shall we? A controller designed to remove wires from your life, while also keeping the cost down. I'm genuinely surprised at just how cheap this is (around £30), while also feeling amazing to hold and play games with. It seems truly shocking how good the EasySMX X05 Pro actually is for the price.

What's also nice is how wonderfully quiet it is. The only noise you actually hear is the slight click from pushing in the thumbsticks, every other button is pretty much a whisper, which is great for family life or for those of you like me who really do get irritated by loud controller clicks. Even though it's all muted, all of the buttons still feel good on the feedback from pressing them. Even the D-Pad actually feels quite nice on this, with a clear click you can feel for the direction pressed.

It has 1000mAh battery, dual-stage vibration triggers, a two-stage trigger lock system to swap between quick clicks and long pulls of the triggers, hall effect joysticks to help fight against stick drift, and compared with previous models they upgraded the D-Pad to help stop any missed diagonals.

The device supports 2.4Ghz wireless via a USB dongle supplied with it, Bluetooth and USB-C Wired.

You also get a bit of fancy lighting on it, which I know how some feel about everything having some form of RGB nowadays - but you can adjust the lighting directly on the controller, no need for an app. You can swap it between a dynamic moving colour bar, a breathing animation with different colours, a solid colour or none at all. Yes, you can turn the RGB completely off.

There's also two extra buttons on the top between the triggers and shoulder buttons (M1 & M2). These also don't need an extra app to configure, you can do it all on the controller directly which works perfectly. You just hold down the M button in the middle, with either M1 or M2 and it will flash red to tell you it's ready, then tap the button you want to assign it and press M again and it's done. No fuss at all. Nice!

Plug and play on my Linux Desktop and Steam Deck too, absolutely no issues with input there thanks to Steam Input.

For me, the most important thing was comfort. And I don't know exactly what it is about it, but I find it far more comfortable than my 8BitDo Ultimate and Ultimate 2. It just seems to fit into my hands a whole lot better. It's really nice to hold.

That's all the good stuff, and now onto why I cannot currently recommend anyone purchase it.

The EasySMX X05 Pro looks and feels like a premium controller. It is so close to perfect it's unreal. However, it has one absolutely massive glaring flaw that needs to be dealt with. The triggers are a problem. If you press the triggers a couple of times quickly when in long travel mode (the default / normal trigger experience), it will then incorrectly detect some light pressing as if you're fully pulling on the triggers. Let's say you pull down on triggers three times lightly, after that it will always act like you've pulled it down all the way to 100%, like you've enabled the locks on the back of the device for trigger clicks. You have to pull the triggers down hard to max to get it to reset and act normally again and it will happen constantly. This seems like a software issue, so if they can do a firmware update to solve that trigger problem, it would be pretty much perfection.

It's sad to end the review on such a technical problem, and the controller will now gather dust until that is solved as that's a complete deal-breaker for me.

See more on their website. You can also buy from the likes of Amazon.