Setting up shop in London late last night, acclaimed PC peripheral maker Razer announced its first-ever smartphone. Simply called the Razer phone, I'm already bitter about it attempting to hog the space of Motorola's iconic 2000s handset.
If you follow company aquisitions and buyouts, you probably saw this one coming a mile away. Razer bought smartphone start-up Nextbit earlier this year, and they've been working on a debut handset together ever since.
But why? Well, while most think mobile gaming is all about waiting for buildings to come off cooldowns and stacked up pieces of candy, the unstoppable rise of the MOBA genre has made smartphone gaming far more compelling in recent years. Vainglory has been a big title for a while, but the Tencent/Riot owned Arena of Valor is seeing a wider release real soon that's sure to cause a stir. On top of that, there's plenty of captivating single-player titles on mobile that this beast will crunch through without breaking a sweat.
Possibly one of the first truly mobile devices to rock a 120Hz screen, the Razer phone will feel smooth. It uses the very same Snapdragon 835 processor found in flagship handsets like the recent Galaxy S8 and Google Pixel 2 machines but packs a mighty 8GB of system RAM - twice as much as its competitors. There's a dual 12MP camera on the back and a pretty good 8MP snapper on the front, and it's all wrapped around a beefy 4,000mAH battery that beats out the standard-sized Galaxy S8 by a whole 1,000mAH.
Clearly Razer are going for speed and big battery to boot. Just like their peripherals, they're targeting the gamer market here, and a battery like that should be able to cope with MOBAs on the go, and plenty of Pokémon GO when you're feeling the need to stretch your legs.
But during the reveal event, Razer didn't mention how it would factor into their own current line-up. They've been attempting to dominate the deskscape for many years now with both hardware and software that frequently works together in lots of gimmicky ways.
As far as we can tell, they've dodged whatever RBG bullet many expected them to take to keep in line with their slick, glowing keyboards and mice, but have indeed followed the trend of ridding the phone of a traditional 3.5mm headphone jack. There's a USB-C to 3.5mm DAC in the box, but that's not the point. That's the tradeoff for a nice battery.
They've yet to mention the resolution of the screen, but with all that power under the hood, the only bet we can make is that they're stick with a 1080p display to keep the experience smooth and the battery from draining too quickly. And with it being 120Hz, too, we're not sure what kind of specs to anticipate in a high-refresh screen of that size., we can't see the screen being cutting-edge tech outside of that.
At $700 for very respectable internals, the Razer phone ships in North America and Europe on November 17. Pre-orders are open.
