Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan Shows Us Project Fiona And The Blade Notebook

We couldn’t go to CES and not see what Razer had on display, and fortunately, CEO Min-Liang Tan was on hand to take us on a quick tour through the company’s booth. In between talking about the company’s new gaming accessories and their Synapse cloud storage system for game settings, we were (thankfully) able to get our hands on the Project Fiona tablet and the Razer Blade gaming notebook.

For the second year in a row, Razer has come to CES with the aim of disrupting mobile PC gaming, but the Project Fiona tablet couldn’t look any more different than its predecessor. It’s a surprisingly light machine, but Fiona was more than enough to handle traipsing through the world of Skyrim with its Core i7 processor. Even so, Devin the indie game maven was particularly enamored that he was able to demo a bit of Terraria on camera.

Razer is testing the waters with the Fiona, and Tan tells us that it could enter production in one form or another if it gets enough of a positive response. Look at the Switchblade for example — though the actual handheld never quite materialized, the concept was integrated into the company’s insane Blade gaming notebook.

We’ve covered the Blade before, but actually seeing it in person is a completely different experience. The computer itself is remarkably thin and light (not to mention incredibly spec’d) but people’s eyes are understandably drawn to the Switchblade UI embedded to the right of the keyboard. While the Switchblade LCD keys don’t depress as deeply as those on the regular keyboard (I’m decidedly picky when it comes to that stuff), the overall experience was one has a lot of potential.

Razer is courting developers with an SDK that will launch alongside the Blade itself in an effort to drive interest in creating apps for the platform, and to that end the company will also be distributing a standalone USB version of their Switchblade UI available to developers. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a consumer model could eventually hit store shelves — Tan wouldn’t comment on products in production, but he admits that it would be totally doable.

Anyway, this is one of our longer hands-on videos since it encompasses most of Razer’s booth, so sit back with some popcorn and enjoy. Trust me, if you’re a gamer, you’ll want to stick around for the whole thing.