Razer Unveils Portable Gaming Device Concept

MerelyASetback writes "Razer has shown a new concept for a gaming device that uses a pair of 7-inch multitouch displays as well as a layer of tactile, dynamic keys on the lower screen. Much like the Optimus Maximus of yesteryear, this keyboard would enable gamers to place different screens underneath depending on the title, and even within a game — you could imagine the keys shifting to account for different POVs, levels, scenarios, etc. Internally, the concept is based around an Intel Atom processor, but there's no word on what kind of GPU would work alongside of it."

Comments

Looks fancy, but...

[Gaygirlie]

..it looks like the game needs to support this thing for it to work properly, and that's where all these fancy ideas usually fail; it'll get 2-3 games that supports it, but in a year everyone's already forgotten about it and moved on. It'd be different if they went ahead and developed an actual standard API that games could use to display parts of their UI on other devices and that API worked with every manufacturer's devices, it might actually catch on! But.. well, given how short-sighted and greedy companies usually are they will just try to lock people to their own devices and then wonder why it didn't work.

Re:Looks fancy, but...

[somersault]

Who has time to look at their keyboard and decipher icons when gaming? Once you've got the basic keys down you rarely need to look down, and the letter keys are just as useful for finding your bearings when you do. I used to really want an Optimus just because it is such a cool gadget, but now I don't actually care.

It might help slightly for learning shortcuts in stuff like design applications and games, but I'd like to see some research. I think it maybe would actually just act as a hindrance as people come to rely on looking for the icons rather than their muscle memory and spacial awareness.

If I always have a reference available, it stops me from trying to remember things as I would if I didn't have the reference (where I'd probably recourse to trial and error, which would reinforce my memory of what's right and what's wrong). Examples of such things that I tend to still look up these days being the syntax of lesser used control structures, string processing commands and regexp stuff in PERL. If I couldn't Google for this stuff I'd have memorised it by now.