Razer Inc. announced earlier this week that its “biggest unveiling” to date will take place in less than a month on the 1st of November. The announcement was accompanied by a promotional photo depicting a man utilizing what appears to be a handheld device, and unsurprisingly this has fueled the idea that Razer might be planning the release of its very first smartphone in the coming weeks. This is not the first time the Razer brand has been associated with the smartphone market following the company’s acquisition of Nextbit earlier this year, and sure enough, the company already confirmed back in September that a mobile device for gamers is in the works.
To be clear, Razer didn’t outright confirm the nature of this “biggest unveiling” and the only clue as to what new products could be announced on November 1 was given by the aforementioned promotional photo. Having said that, the event could be centered on other types of products, but so far all evidence suggests that Razer is getting ready for the unveiling of its first smartphone ever. Unfortunately, there’s virtually no information regarding this particular product, so only time will tell what kind of internal hardware it will rely on. Nevertheless, Razer is well known for specializing in computer hardware for gamers, and so far the company gave no reasons to suspect that its upcoming smartphone will target a different audience. With that in mind and considering the usual requirements from gaming enthusiasts, the Razer smartphone should – at least in theory – provide a powerful processor and graphics chip that can handle decent framerates at fairly high resolutions, and perhaps the device might also offer some sort of virtual reality or augmented reality features.
Arguably, one of the biggest issues posed by smartphones in terms of gaming boils down to a poor and unintuitive user interface and control scheme, specifically when the games are controlled solely through the touchscreen. Granted, some mobile games have been designed from the ground up to function well in conjunction with touch inputs, but many other games that usually require precision and a good sense of tactile feedback – such as retro console ports or any platformers for that matter – generally suffer from the usual smartphone control scheme. Once again, it remains to be seen if Razer’s smartphone will be oriented towards gamers and whether it will attempt to fix some of these core issues. That is of course if the company will indeed announce its first-ever smartphone on the 1st of November, as there is still a possibility that this seemingly handheld device could take a different form.