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By 10 January 2011 | Categories: news

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Unveiled recently at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas were a large number of tablets, smartphones, notebooks and operating systems, but one of the stranger concept devices to make an appearance was the Razer Switchblade.

According to Cnet, the concept aims to bring traditionally desktop-bound PC games to a handheld form factor. Razer is well known in the PC gaming community for manufacturing performance peripherals such as gaming mice and keyboards, and seems like the perfect candidate to drive the success of the Switchblade.
 
The Intel Atom based device utilises a touch-screen and dynamic tactile keyboard to enable gamers to control the game in question. The most amazing thing about this partnership is that the dynamic keyboard automatically adjusts its layout and configuration based on the game being played.
 
For example, in normal use the keyboard layout would be optimised for navigating through menus say, and once a user starts up a game (let's say, World of Warcraft), the keyboard changes to accommodate the game in question. Instead of featuring normal keys with letters, these will change to spell and ability slots on the fly. Check out the video below to see exactly how this works.
 
Razer CEO, Min-Liang Tan said, “PC gaming has always been impossible in a portable form factor, so we took a familiar, traditional piece of hardware, the keyboard, and developed an all new user interface designed just for mobile PC gaming, and quite frankly, the result is just phenomenal.”
 
At this stage it is yet unclear whether the Switchblade will be going into production or whether it was merely intended as a demonstration of future Razer technology. Either way, we'll be keeping an eye on these interesting devices and the game changing (excuse the pun) keyboard technology they feature.

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