The Razer Blade gaming laptop, which was unveiled in a slightly different form as the Switchblade, is one of those mad concepts that you look at with awe, but secretly know it’s never going to get made. Except it is. Razer’s confirmed that it’s going to open up pre-orders for the gamer’s dream device imminently.
Razer’s built the 17-inch Blade from the ground up to be the perfect games machine; on the right of the normal keyboard is a set of 10 dedicated keys that can be assigned any role. Give a key a job and a dynamic graphic will light it up to show you what it does. Set that key as a specific magic spell, say, and it’ll have a picture on it of a potion.
Under that there’s a small display that can be used to show bespoke information. Depending on the game, this could be a map, your inventory or your health and ammo count. Developers have reportedly had the Razer Blade for a while now, to get to grips with how their games can work with the controls.
Is HTC and OnLive about to render gaming PCs obsolete?
The price is pretty steep, $2,799 (£1,788), but for that you get a machine specced up to the nines for gaming, plus a 256GB solid state drive. Razer’s only just on track for its ‘end of 2011’ launch date: it’s going to put the Blade on pre-order any minute now, for delivery in time for Christmas within the US.
If you live outside of the US and want one, we wouldn’t be all that confident in it arriving before Santa, unless you want to pay through the nose. Check out Razer singing the Blade’s praises in truly intense style when it was the fledgling Switchblade:
