Modern premium controllers allow you to adjust a boatload of settings, letting you tweak button mappings, trigger sensitivity, and more using a companion software. It’s a great way to tailor your gamepad exactly to your liking. Problem is, you’ll have to preprogram everything, with some of the more advanced ones allowing you to keep a few presents onboard for changing your settings on the fly. The Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra changes the game by letting you customize your settings on the fly.
How? By coming with an integrated display that comes with built-in software for dialing in your adjustments. No need to launch a separate software or hook it up to a different machine – this thing has its customization software built right into the gamepad itself.
The Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra puts a full color screen right at the top center of the gamepad, moving the Xbox button down a bit to accommodate the panel. It’s not a touchscreen, by the way, so you interact with it using the gamepad’s physical controls, which, we guess, makes sense, since that’s what controllers do. It’s joined by the usual set of controls, so you get a four action buttons, asymmetric thumb sticks, a D-pad, shoulder buttons, triggers, and system buttons.
Since this is a premium controller, though, they throw in all the usual stuff you’ll find in pricier gamepads, such as hair-trigger lockouts, tactile microswitches, and swappable thumb sticks. They also threw in four programmable buttons in the rear, so you get additional controls for all those fingers gripping the backside of the gamepad, as well as Hall effect sticks, which use magnets and electrical conductors to detect movement, eliminating the stick drift that all analog sticks eventually end up developing over time after plenty of use.
The Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra’s big selling point, of course, is the built-in screen, where you can the button mapping, dead zones, axis response modes, vibration intensity, RGB lighting, and more. It also has all the advanced audio enhancements from their Recon controller and the on-the-fly stick sensitivity settings from their React controller available, all of which are accessible from the same screen. Players can store up to 10 profiles to the onboard memory, too, so you can save settings that you like, allowing you to quickly return to them next time around. If you connect the controller to your smartphone (you’ll need to download the companion app), you can even display phone messages and notifications on the screen, so you’ll never miss an important message even when you’re fully immersed during gameplay.
It’s compatible with the Xbox Series, Xbox One, Windows, and Android, by the way, so you can use the same controller for consoles, PCs, and even mobile devices. Heck, it even supports some smart TVs, if you want to use it as a TV remote of sorts. Other features include a 2.4GHz receiver for lag-free wireless connection, built-in Bluetooth, a rapid-charging dock, and a battery rated at 30 hours of gameplay.
The Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra is now available for preorder, with a December 15 ship date.
