Razer announces Switchblade 7-inch PC gaming tablet concept

by Griffin McElroy on Jan 6th 2011 2:00PM

CES 2011 is proving to be a veritable cornucopia of radical, tantalizing concepts that aren't real products just yet. For instance, PC hardware manufacturer Razer turned our heads with the Switchblade -- a 7-inch gaming tablet with a multi-touch screen and keys that change based on the game that's being played. Trust us, it's much more impressive on video -- check out the demonstration posted after the jump to see this shape-shifting magic act in motion.

Sadly, Razer hasn't announced any plans to actually take the Switchblade to market, nor most of the device's technical specs. We'll try to get some answers when we stop by Razer's booth on the CES show floor. If that doesn't work, we'll try to totally steal whatever demo model they've got. Oh, wait. We probably shouldn't have said that part on the internet. You didn't hear that, capiche?

Razer Switchblade concept art (1/6/11)

Via: Engadget
Source: Razer

Tags: ces-2011, pc, razer, razer-switchblade, switchblade, tablet, touchscreen

Reader Comments (71)

Just no.

They make good mice though!

@thisredengine

Really? What do you find disagreeable about this product? I think it's quite neat, and I think that might be the consensus.

@Assmar There's nothing neat about a gaming-oriented computer using the most underpowered processor out there and touting World of Warcraft or Quake Live as the best apps it can handle.

@Razer If you're still looking to get rid of it, I'll take the one thisredengine turned down.

@jksprat Yeah, with all the processors that just dropped, why ATOM? Maybe that'll put it in the price range of a high end smart phone though, keep it on the cheap?

@Assmar That thing isn't going to be cheap if it's sporting an OLED keyboard.

@Assmar

Maybe it has something to do with battery life?

@thisredengine
I agree. No. How is a Netbook with fewer buttons going to revolutionize anything? Also, you have to use a combo of the keyboard...and a touch screen? How is that anything other than miserable? Yeah, let me take my hands off the keys to tap tap tap the screen, or i'll put one on the keys and one on the screen...which leaves me zero hands to hold the "mobile" gaming rig which limits it to desks or possibly laps. At least a with a real Netbook you can keyboard+mouse.. Or do stuff, like, drag.

They make keyboards with _no_ markings on the keys (Das Keyboard) and guess what, it's still entirely functional. Putting new pictures on keys isn't going to accomplish anything. This is just a fancier version of overlays...which were dumb when the Intellivision used them like 25 years ago, and remain dumb today.

@jksprat

Considering that WoW is probably 90% of the time spent playing PC games, they'd be stupid not to demonstrate it on their device.

And I'm a person who can't stand WoW. The popularity of it is undeniable. Blizzard owns PC gaming right now, and Valve owns anything that isn't Blizzard.

@thisredengine

Since it's razer we can assume that if it costs 300 dollars to make it will sell for around 900 dollars. Also, if you play WoW (or any mmo for that matter) there aren't enough buttons present to even handle what most people have on their action bars, not to mention that you can't have both letter's and your usual action bars up at the same time. How is a touchscreen useful for fps', rpg's or mmo's? Sure it might be useable for stuff like world of goo or rts's, but its uses end there. Any gamer with half a brain will just skip right on buy and buy something more useful. It will probably be cheaper to buy alienware's small laptop than to buy this piece of garbage.

Innovative? Yes. Better? No.

i think the real news is that Joystiq has finally started reading their sister sites lol

i remember a keyboard came out with this concept, it looked so sexy... and costs thousands of dollars. Lets hope this can stay within the 500 price range

For real.

"Uh, Joystiq, you know this story was on (insert sister site here) a week ago, right?"

Also, the keyboard you are thinking of was the Maximus. It had individual LCD screens under each key. This? It has a touchscreen LCD underneath the keys, and the keys themselves are a rubber overlay. So everything you see is being shown thru rubber.

@Drakkenfyre

i think they were actually OLED which was why it was so expensive.

@maveric101

You are right, it had OLED screens. It died quickly when very few people wanted to spend $1600 on a keyboard, and then it also had ergonomic issues.

@Drakkenfyre

It still exists.

And its called the "Optimus Maximus." It was in development for years, so it was old news by the time it was actually available for purchase.

The $2400 price tag puts it in quite a narrow niche, too.

As for this Switchblade... I dunno. I love the idea of adaptive keyboards, but I doubt this thing will be significantly more affordable than the Optimus, and nothing in this video shows how a touch screen replaces a mouse for gaming purposes.

It sounds very unwieldy.

Wow, that's pretty cool.

I love progress. :)

It's doomed to fail.

It's a netbook, running an Intel Atom processor, with a touchscreen keyboard that only uses a rubber OVERLAY to provide actual keys. So the displays on the keys won't look anything near like it does in the video.

How weak is the Intel Atom CPU? It chokes on some heavy Flash games. This thing isn't for gaming, no matter what the company does or thinks, and this is coming from a Razer fan.

It's a concept, they haven't even said if it would be released. I am guessing no, because people would laugh at how weak it is.

@Drakkenfyre The morons who rated this down are idiots. This guy speaks truth.

@Drakkenfyre

The Atom is a weird ass processor. I have a netbook running on a 1.6ghz Atom and its generally awful for gaming.

The "water effects" in the Monkey Island Special Editions brought it to a deliberate chug, WoW runs at 10fps maximum, and it can just barely handle Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3.

For some reason, though, Deus Ex runs amazingly.

still needs a USB port for a mouse

as good as multi touch can be, some games demand it

@Gonzie

There's a USB port on it, you can see it clearly at 0:26.

Unless you meant that it's a shame it still needs a mouse, and in that way isn't completely portable. In that case, never mind. lol.

@Gonzie

This is what makes their choice of WoW really confusing, to my eye.

I don't see how a touch screen would be any more intuitive for camera movement than a laptop touch pad, and touch pads are f-ing awful for controlling a camera.

I don't get it.

It runs on an ATOM processor of all things. Failure from the start.

Not like WoW and Quake Live push pixels like crazy either.

that video seems so epic for some reason...

@ehtoanokuso
It's the asian guy and his "power" vocabulary...Don't be fooled!

I think my little sister has one of these O_o except in purple and green.

I'd like to see what comes of this, really.

Without a mouse it's useless.

The first couple of things he said were HILARIOUS

Looks cool, but I was confused when he said the keyboard could intelligently adapt itself to the control scheme of any game. What they were showing (in concept) looked cool, but it also looked like each game shown was sending the data to the computer itself to display those icons on the keyboard. By saying that it could intelligently adapt itself to any game's control scheme, that makes me think that it's all dynamic. Naturally, I'd prefer the former because it's overall more reliable.

And I approve of it playing Tron Legacy.

@TRONdll
Trust me, it won't be dynamic...Games lack the kind of standardization to make that a real possibility. It's too much effort for a company to put out, presets are going to be how this works.

The "keyboard" is actually a touchscreen LCD underneath. It has rubber keys overlaid ontop of it to give it actual physical keys, but it's still a touchscreen, and the rubber will distort the image of whatever is shown thru them.

@KobaltKode

Its not impossible, it would just be incredibly limited. WoW already has support for crap like Razer mice and whatever the hell those godawful monstrous plastic "gaming" keyboard things are called.

It would totally be a game by game basis, though, and there's no coincidence that 2/3 of the games they display are Blizzard games and Razer cozily makes Blizzard branded mice.

@Gonzie

The video shows 1 USB port on the left side.

"PC gaming has always been impossible in a portable form factor"...

...erm Laptop?

@P1P hehe exactly so it would probably cost you more than a laptop with similar capabilities and yet do less than the laptop.

@P1P This. My 3-year old laptop still runs most new games on high settings without any problems, and it wasn't even that expensive (as this probably would be)

Did he really say powerful ATOM processor?
Really?

@burningmice It is fairly powerful for netbooks and smaller devices.

@Damanx
Not even. AMD's offerings are a lot better than intels' Atom and they have stronger GPU capability. If they dropped the Atom processor I can see this being successful.

That... actually looks like it would work well. At least, it looks much better than that thing that Panasonic is working on (the Jungle).

@BPMOmega XBL PSN Steam

I say, "Welcome!" to the Jungle. It's got fun and games.

@BPMOmega XBL PSN Steam - I couldn't help but think of the Jungle either. After the hilarious reaction that thing got, I'm surprised that Razer is showing something similar. Obviously this thing has a lot more function (well, it would, were it not a prototype that likely will never come to market) than the Jungle, but the market space it would be launching into is the same (people wanting to play WoW on the go, I guess).

If anything, this story makes me wonder what happened to that Art Lebedev keyboard that came out a few years ago. I'm still waiting for the affordable version of that.

@BananaBoat - Correction: Apparently Engadget thinks it most likely will come to market (possibly). It'll be interesting to see what the price point might be. If it is in the netbook price range of about 300ish dollars, I'd be down for one.

What ever happen to the ONZA your showed off last year?

this is going to be interresting if they can pull off good hardware specs without going too high on the price, and if they make it a little bit bigger... 7" is just too small, i have an acer netbook, 10.1" and it's just right

Good hardware specs? It's running an Intel Atom CPU.

It slows down on Farmville, and I am not exaggerating.

@Drakkenfyre I know, I have an Aspire One netbook, which has Atom N270, I agree Atom is not made for gaming, but to keep low TDP's, however, I think Intel can come up with a new solution with either Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge architectures, and I'm sure Razer will go for that solution.

with new 32 nm architecture, they can keep low TDP improving performance, and im not even talking about 22 nm, which i'm sure it will be out before Razer launches this, so they can pack a lot of processing power while keeping low TDP's

but hey, who said Intel Atom was the definitive procesor for the Switchblade?? i mean, it's just a prototype... they can opt for a (possible) i3 2100UM or something like that..

(Probably) an unintentionally hilarious video.

@Fillem Yeah they must have taken a page from Square's book- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAVTCAk9pmg

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World of Warcraft

Razer announces Switchblade 7-inch PC gaming tablet concept

Razer Switchblade concept art (1/6/11)

Reader Comments (71)

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:03PM thisredengine said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:21PM Assmar said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:31PM jksprat said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:39PM Epoque said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:59PM Assmar said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 3:08PM jksprat said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 3:40PM brotherfranciz said

Posted: Jan 7th 2011 12:23AM sigma8 said

Posted: Jan 7th 2011 5:26AM Invigilator said

Posted: Jan 7th 2011 7:15AM CaptainFaith said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:03PM PR0F3TA said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:52PM Drakkenfyre said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 3:27PM maveric101 said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 6:05PM Drakkenfyre said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 10:28PM Chareth Cutestory said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:03PM Ezio Auditore da Firenze said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:54PM Drakkenfyre said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 5:38PM jksprat said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 10:32PM Chareth Cutestory said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:09PM Gonzie said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:17PM x4str0m3ch said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 10:36PM Chareth Cutestory said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:11PM jksprat said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:11PM ehtoanokuso said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:31PM KobaltKode said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:11PM JnRx said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:13PM x4str0m3ch said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:13PM E4saracTRX said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:18PM Peril said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:19PM TRONdll said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:36PM KobaltKode said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:57PM Drakkenfyre said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 10:39PM Chareth Cutestory said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:19PM UncleFester said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:22PM P1P said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 3:01PM alucard3000 said

Posted: Jan 7th 2011 8:31AM Unvrfd said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:25PM burningmice said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 2:40PM Damanx said

Posted: Jan 6th 2011 5:57PM Problem Medic said

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