Brook Pocket Auto Catch Review: Taking care of the boring bits of Pokémon GO

During GDC, we met up with a representative of Brook, the hardware developer responsible for a bunch of third party controllers. We mentioned we were a mobile site, and Brook kindly provided us with a Pocket Auto Catch for Pokémon GO, so we figured: let’s review it.

For those that don’t know, the Pocket Auto Catch takes care of all of boring stuff in Pokémon GO. Much like the Pokémon GO Plus, the Pocket Auto Catch vibrates whenever you’re near a PokéStop or Pokémon. You can then either whip your phone out and interact with whatever it is or tap a button on the Pokémon GO Plus to have the game interact with it automatically.

Where the Pocket Auto Catch differs from the Pokémon GO Plus – besides the price – is in its ability to take care of all of that stuff for you. You can set it to automatically catch Pokémon and interact with PokéStops that you walk past.

There are separate settings for new Pokémon and those you’ve already caught too, so if you’d rather manually try and catch a tougher Pokémon, you can simply check whenever the Pocket Auto Catch vibrates to see if you need to pull your phone out.

The Pocket Auto Catch is cheaper than Pokémon GO Plus

Even if you just want a Pokémon GO Plus but don’t want to pay the extortionate fee, the Pocket Auto Catch has you covered. You can set it to just notify you whenever you’re near anything, and can then either press the button or get your phone out to interact. It even mimics the vibrations of the Pokémon GO Plus, so if you’ve used one before, transitioning to this is easy peasy.

We’d even argue that it’s a more attractive proposition for adults, who might not want a Pokémon GO Plus strapped to their wrist. The automation also helps if you’re too busy to check your phone, allowing you to catch a few Pokémon and spin a few PokéStops while you dash for your train.

The best part about the Pocket Auto Catch though, is its connectivity. We actually have a Pokémon GO Plus and found it plagued with connectivity issues. It regularly just drops its connection with Pokémon GO for no apparent reason, which happens only rarely with the Pocket Auto Catch.

However, in the middle of a bustling city like San Francisco – the home of GDC – it did regularly drop connection. We can’t really complain though, because the device was going crazy on our wrist due to the sheer number of PokéStops, gyms, and Pokémon knocking about. If we can’t cope in all of that hustle and bustle, how can we expect this tiny device on our wrist to?

Connectivity was solid – as long as we weren’t in busy city environments

In ordinary environments, the Pocket Auto Catch was basically flawless though. It purposefully drops connection once per hour, so you do have to go in and reconnect it, but that was never a huge problem for us. As long as you keep the vibration setting on (it’s nice that you can turn it off!) you’ll easily spot when it stops reacting. Like we said, this is a rarity but it did happen.

The biggest compliment we can pay the Pocket Auto Catch though, is the fact that it got us playing Pokémon GO way more than we were before. Rather than find the experience frustrating (Pokémon GO Plus) or embarrasing (Pokémon GO Plus or constantly pulling up the app in public), we were just excited to check out what we’d caught along the way whenever we did actually stop.

So if, like us, you don’t really want to do all of that button pressing and stopping to open the app every few seconds, we can’t recommend the Pocket Auto Catch enough. It solves all of those problems, looks attractive on the wrist, and has all of the settings you’d possibly need, or want, to tweak. It might even just get you back into Pokémon GO too.