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Almost 365 days ago, Razer reached into its bag of ill-conceived concept devices and plucked out the Switchblade — a funky-looking gaming netbook that failed to materialise.
Fast forward a year and Razer has plucked yet another blinder from its sack of implausibility. Behold, friends, Project Fiona.
Whereas the Switchblade was based on last year’s flavour of the gadget month, netbooks, Project Fiona, somewhat predictably, is based on the thing everyone and their grandmothers are currently going nuts for — tablets.
The bulk of the system’s body is taken up by a 10-inch, 1,280×800-pixel display which, of course, is touch-sensitive. No self-respecting gamer would be seen prodding at a screen in a hardcore gaming session, however, which is why Razer has incorporated a pair of ludicrous controller handles on each side.
The handles make Fiona look a bit like a dinner tray, but they do serve a purpose, as each of them houses an analogue controller and several trigger buttons, so they could provide relatively precise control in first person shooters and 3D platform games.
Razer has also thrown in a couple of technologies that allow for alternative control methods. Fiona includes an accelerometer, a three-axis gyroscope and a magnetometer, which could allow touch-free gesture interaction.
Fiona will feature force-feedback vibration, Dolby 7.1 surround-sound capabilities, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. There’s no mention of a dedicated graphics card, but Razer reckons it’ll use an Intel Core i7 CPU, which seems an odd choice to us. If it does indeed feature this chip, it’ll be blessed with enormous power, but we wouldn’t expect much in the way of battery life.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves a little here. Based on Razer’s past efforts, we don’t expect Project Fiona to ever materialise. The company reckons it’ll be out at the end of 2012 for around $1,000 (£650). We hope it proves us wrong, but our bet is that in a year’s time, Fiona will a distant memory and we’ll be writing about some other pie in the sky gaming concept.
In the meantime, check out our sister site GameSpot’s demo video:
Your thoughts, as usual, are welcome in the comments or on our Facebook page.
