CES 2011: Razer Shows Off the Switchblade Gaming System

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You probably know Razer best as a huge provider of gaming controllers for PC, but you might have to change that perception when you get a look at their new toy, the Switchblade, which just made its appearance out at CES.

The Switchblade is, surprisingly enough, the equivalent of a Playstation Portable or a Nintendo DS, but for the PC gaming market. It’s running an Intel Atom processor, with an Ion GPU, a seven inch multitouch display running at a resolution that hasn’t been announced yet, and a keyboard that can reconfigure itself based on the game you’re playing. Obviously, if you started playing World of Warcraft, as seen in the pic above, you wouldn’t want to try steering your way around Azeroth with the controls from Call of Duty 4.

It’s a collaborative design, reportedly, as Razer got a little help from its friends out at Intel, which makes some sense given how the two work–Razer definitely needed some help on basic PC architecture.

Basically, the Switchblade is designed to solve the “main problem with mobile PC gaming”, which according to statements from Razer is trying to get the mouse and keyboard control scheme into a package sufficiently small to move it. Further from Razer:

“By combining adaptive on-the-fly controls and display, we managed to maintain the full tactile keyboard in a miniature computer while saving valuable screen estate.”

Remember, this is all still at the prototype stages–word on pricing and availability is so far from where we are right now that we can barely even see it from here–but the concept alone is well worth looking into. Imagine being able to stage a LAN party at any wi-fi hotspot, or taking your PC games anywhere. If this works as well as some think it might, it might be one of the big game-changers of CES.