We've heard a couple of times about Sony's longterm plan to start bringing more of its most famous intellectual properties into the mobile gaming realm as a way of spinning up more revenue, and now a patent filed by Sony Interactive Entertainment in Japan holds another clue.

The patent is for a pretty typical-looking mobile gaming controller, just with all the hallmarks of Sony's DualShock controller from the PS4 era. Just like other options already on the market, it'd sandwich your phone between two halves of a DualShock.

This would give you the benefits of proper buttons and joysticks, while leaving you the ability to play your game without the screen obscured by your fingers at all. Given that the DualShock (and the PS5's DualSense) are popular choices for bluetooth controllers on mobile already, it makes sense to offer a more tailored design.

Sony's version would apparently also have the ability to detect you tilting the controller around, potentially letting you use gyro controls in a game that doesn't interface with your phone's own ability to sense movement (if it has it at all).

For now, though, the patent has to be taken with a pinch of salt, even with drawings as credible as the one you can see above included in it. Until something concrete comes out of PlayStation, this'll remain merely a potential design for a hypothetical controller, rather than something we can be certain is on its way to market.