Either Xiaomi is running out of ideas, or it has too many of them. Amongst the company’s recent Chinese announcements was a surprise — the Pocket Guitar. It’s not a very small ukulele, though that would also be acceptable. Instead, it’s a smartphone case that does something interesting.
Everyone who has seen a music video knows how to play air guitar, in much the same way that anyone who has ever listened to Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight immediately gains the ability to play the air drums. Xiaomi’s concept makes the ‘guitar’ part a little more tangible.
Pocket Guitar hero
The Pocket Guitar is, essentially, a dual-touch surface that folds up on the back of a smartphone case. Unflip it, and it’ll do one of two things. Either you can use it to prop up your phone (boring, but handy for watching that one Cadbury’s commercial). Or you can use the surfaces to simulate playing the guitar.
It’s supposed to be used with the Xiaomi 18 Pro and Xiaomi 18 Pro Max phones, which feature a secondary display on the rear. The Pocket Guitar gets information for playing its library of 15,000 songs on that display via Changba, the companion app for the device. Users fiddle with the chord and string section to ‘play’ these tracks on the go. It’s all powered by a 630mAh battery that’ll last around 30 hours, to hear Xiaomi explain it.
It’s a fair bit like Guitar Hero, which actually had a small controller for the Nintendo DS version. This one’s more compact, more complex, and about as hard to locate as Activision’s now-retro hardware.
Xiaomi’s Pocket Guitar and its app are only confirmed for China right now. Unless you’re able to read Hanzi (and, presumably, any musical notation), you probably won’t import one. At R1,500 (¥600), though, the temptation to try will be tough to overcome.
