Gaming hardware developer Razer’s flirtation with the mobile platform has only been growing over the past few months, and it’s one of the worst kept secrets that the company has been looking to launch their first phone for a while now. Earlier in June, CEO Min-Liang Tan stated that Razer had plans to ‘disrupt’ the mobile gaming market, and that this latest push was going to be a ‘huge part of [Razer’s] business’. Amidst the recent announcement of the iPhone X, and the greater importance that the leading smartphone companies have placed on gaming recently, these are bold claims indeed. With Razer acquiring Nextbit – the creators of the Robin phone – in January, it’s always been a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ the company would make a splash in mobile gaming. Today, Tan has given the biggest hint that an upcoming Razer Phone is very close to reality, as a picture of the CEO with Tom Moss, the SVP/GM of Mobile for Razer, has revealed a suspicious smartphone-shaped device with the company’s logo in Tan’s pocket.
Got to spend quality time with the second best gamer at our company @minliangtan today. Exciting times ahead! pic.twitter.com/f6OvNKrN6L
— Tom Moss (@rebelleader) October 4, 2017
An upcoming smartphone from Razer would not be the first attempt at a gaming-focused mobile device, and it doesn’t exactly bode well that many similar hardware experiments haven’t exactly been a roaring success, such as the short-lived Sony Xperia Playstation Phone. Furthermore, with barely any games taking advantage of the full power of mainstream devices like the latest iPhones and the iPad Pro, creating an expensive smartphone with impressive specs isn’t enough to have any sort of impact on the industry, at least not without some game-changing software to coincide with such a launch. Still, Razer’s track record with their Blade laptop series has been impressively solid, and at the very least this will mean another quality mobile device that takes gaming seriously. Mobile gaming needs more than a shiny new gaming device to continue to evolve, but hopefully this upcoming launch can serve as a catalyst for an even greater emphasis on the platform.
[via The Verge]
