 For a limited time only, buy an Intel Core i5 or Core i7 CPU and get a free three month subscription to iRacing.com. Available from participating retailers. Click the link in the video description for more details. Welcome to my unboxing and overview. It's not a first look because... Ta-da-da! I broke the seal already. This is the Razer Edge Gaming Tablet. What makes a tablet a gaming tablet? Well, for one thing, if a tablet's performance was measured by weight, then the Razer Edge would definitely be the highest performance tablet out there. The other thing is if a tablet's performance was measured by performance, then the Razer Edge would be the highest performance tablet out there. So yes, it is a gaming tablet. What comes inside is pretty straightforward. Razer's usual attention to detail with the packaging, with their matte black whatnots and all of that. The first thing we find is a power brick. So it's got a short AC cable right here. Quite short, see? Only about one Linus arm length long. Okay, so that plugs into the wall wart, which you'll notice doesn't look much like a tablet wall wart. This looks like a notebook wall wart because this basically is a notebook in a tablet form factor. It's got all the power you'd expect from a notebook, so it needs all the power you'd expect to need to give a notebook. Now it has a much longer thin cable, so that's the DC power cable, that goes out to the tablet itself and terminates in a proprietary connector on a right angle. I would have liked to see some kind of a connector that was non-proprietary in some way. I mean, I guess I can kind of understand why Razer did this. It gets it sort of out of the way while you're holding the device. So next up inside here, we've got just basically some documentation. Welcome to the Cult of Razer and all that sort of good stuff that they usually include with their gear. For gamers by gamers. Why do we make these products? Because, well, no one else did. So we thought we'd do it. There's some Razer stickers as well as, ooh, look, a little cleaning cloth for your product. That's all good stuff. Alright, so that's pretty much it that comes with the tablet. Now this is the Razer Edge Pro, which is the $1,500 version of the tablet. And this is the, but wait, there's more moment, because the $1,500 version of the tablet doesn't come with everything you need necessarily. There's a couple of other accessories that Razer's been shipping out to the press that really help you have the full experience. So number one is the Edge docking station. So the docking station is pretty straightforward. You plug that same proprietary power connector into it. You can plug headphones, microphone, so dedicated headphone and microphone jacks as opposed to the integrated one that's on the tablet itself. You've got an HDMI port, three USB ports, so it also acts as a USB hub. The tablet itself only has one USB 3 port. And then finally, the actual dock itself. Yeah, right there. So it sits just like that. It's a little bit of an angle, so you could sit and use it connected to the dock. It's got some heft to it, so I would actually trust my $1,500 tablet to not be dropped by it. And it has one of the best rubberized sticky bottoms that I think I have ever encountered. If I put this down on the table, I couldn't move it pretty much no matter how hard I tried. So, oh my goodness, it's like stuck. Look at this. I can't even lift it. Oh, there it goes. It's detached now. So it's an excellent rubberized grip. I wish everything had supple, soft rubber like this on the bottom of it. It's outstanding. So there you go. The dock is intended for people who are going to use the Razer Edge as something like a gaming console or you leave the dock next to your TV, for example, and then you plug in the Edge whenever you're going to use it with a wireless controller, say for example. Now, not everyone's going to use it like that. A lot of people are going to go, well, if I wanted to play games on my TV, I could build a media PC, or I could use a console, or I could do any number of those other things that people do to play games on their TVs. So that's where this one comes in. This is the game controller accessory. Welcome to the cult of Razer. Piece of soft foam inside and the game controller itself. So the game controller adds some functionality that you don't have with the tablet on its own. For example, it adds a game controller, which I'm sure you didn't figure out based on the name of the device. So let's go through and let's have a look at what buttons it adds. So you've got two auxiliary buttons here on the left and here on the right handles. You've got a D-pad on the left with A, B, X, Y buttons on the right. So that's how you could play your legacy games. All right. Then you've got two analog sticks, one on the left, one on the right. Nice rubberized tops on them that feel like they should be quite durable. Then on the shoulders, you've got three buttons each. So two top buttons, L1 and L2, R1 and R2, and then two triggers. So left trigger and right trigger. You've also got an extended battery included in this unit that adds while in sort of a hardcore gaming scenario, probably about 45 minutes of extra battery life, and while not in a hardcore gaming scenario, up to a few hours of extra battery life. And then you've got an illuminated Razer logo on the back. You've got pass throughs for all of the important functionality on the top of the tablet. So your keyboard button, your rotation lock, your power button, your volume rockers, your headphone port and your USB 3 port ventilation ports here. And you've got nice little rubber pieces here that are going to keep the tablet from getting scratched up as you insert it into the controller dock. Now it does add. I'm just going to put this in. You can do it pretty quickly. So you pop that in, pop this in here and then lock it in from the bottom. It does add a fair bit of heft to the tablet. In fact, with the whole setup configured, I'm just going to get this box out of the way. Oops. With the whole setup configured, the total weight in pounds, alright, is about pounds. Three pounds, 11 ounces. And I can't remember how many ounces there are in a pound, but that sounds to me like about three and three quarters pounds with the whole thing set up. So it does get quite heavy and it's not the kind of thing where you'd be sitting and gaming with it like this. Sort of like holding it up like this for an extended period of time. So let's now that I've covered all the accessories, which I sort of meant to do near the end, let's talk about the Razer Edge itself. So it's over two pounds just with the tablet alone. It's thick. So if I pull out my HTC One, I can do my trademark size comparison here, which don't worry about getting too close to because I'm going to do an overlay for this. And you can see that this is not a thin tablet by any stretch of the imagination. If you want a thin tablet, you're going to want to be buying yourself something ARM based or something with an Apple processor such as an iPad. This is pretty much a PC. It has a core i7 processor that's clocked at 1.9 gigahertz. So this is the Pro model and up to three gigahertz when using turbo boost, which means you've got great performance, but you compromise that thickness. It's got an aluminum backing, which feels really nice. It feels really premium and it should help to dissipate some of the heat from the tablet itself, particularly when you're gaming. This side acts as an intake and this side acts as an exhaust. So what I found was that while holding the device, my right hand got significantly warmer, where my left hand was actually cooled by the device, which created a bit of a weird effect. But I can understand why they did it this way because it makes the cooling extremely efficient. They only have to have one channel for the air moving through the entire tablet. See, I wanted to call it a notebook there because the back of it really does look kind of like a notebook. And Razer is going to have a keyboard accessory that you can get in the future as well. So they've borrowed some styling from their from their blade, which my Razer blade video actually got blocked by YouTube because I had the word switchblade in the description. So I wasn't able to put ads on that for a long time, but that's just a random vent. Not really about anything. The build quality is outstanding. It really does feel like a premium tablet. So you can see here there's almost no flex to it whatsoever, no matter what I do to it. Part of this is going to be a function of the glass top and aluminum back, and part of it is going to be a function of the fact that it's just thicker. But remember, guys, thickness does not necessarily make it well built, whereas this one really does feel quite well built. The front is completely plain, pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a tablet these days, 10 inch tablet, wider than usual bezel, which at first I kind of went, oh, that's kind of weird. But then I understood why. It's going to be a little bit thicker because of a couple of things. It's a thicker tablet, so the grip you have when holding it is going to be maybe a little bit bigger. And the other thing is if you're gaming on the device, if you're meant to be sort of holding it like this, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a bit of a wider bezel. So I again, I so I understood why they did that. Other than that, in the front, all you've got is a two megapixel camera that you can use for, you know, I don't know, video calling or whatever else. And a dedicated Windows button on the sides of the device. You find nothing. So there's completely plain right side, completely plain left side. On the bottom, you find two speaker girls, which actually worked surprisingly well. I love the front facing speakers on the HTC one, and I think everything should be front facing. However, if we can't have front facing, then I'll settle for bottom facing because at least with bottom facing, you don't cover them up when you hold the device by the side. So many devices do this. Same thing with back facing. A lot of the time you'll cover them up when you're holding it. Bottom facing. I don't really see anyone using a tablet like this, so should be fine. Not too worried about that. Then on the top is where we find all the serious business I.O. Oh, and I OK, so I complained about the proprietary connector. I do understand why they have it because it acts as a dock and an HDMI and a USB hub and all that stuff. I just don't necessarily like it. That's all. That's all. Just throwing that out there. So we've got our power button, our keyboard button, which is awesome. This was a lifesaver because the keyboard button just is like OK, if you're using it as a gaming device, how often do you end up needing a keyboard? Just to, I don't know, just get out of a menu or navigate something or whatever else, because many games for Windows are not optimized for just a computerly touch device. So it was really nice to have that dedicated keyboard button. You've got a rotation lock, volume rocker, as well as a headphone microphone jack and a single USB 3 port. Spec wise, like I said, this is the Pro, so I mentioned the Core i7 processor. It's got 8 gigs of RAM, a 256 gig SSD, which means you've got enough space to actually put a fair number of games on it. And it has a GeForce GT640LE. That's what makes this tablet gaming grade as opposed to just another tablet that's using the onboard video on the processor built into the Ivy Bridge CPU. So, OK, what does a 640M really mean in terms of a gaming experience? I'm going to show you guys how quickly it boots up. There you go. You can thank the SSD for that. So what does that mean in terms of, oh, it looks like, oh, that's kind of funny. My siblings were playing games on this thing and apparently they left it in a game, which is handy for doing product demos. There we go. So let's reconnect that controller and we've got some Dirt 3 going on here. So what does that mean in terms of the gaming experience? It's legitimately better. It's way better than onboard. Is it a GTX Titan? No, it's not a GTX Titan. Is it intended to be a GTX Titan? No, I mean, this device actually doesn't cost that much more than a Titan for the whole thing. OK, it does cost more, but not that much more. So what does it actually do? Well, it runs modern games with the exception of super, super high end games like Crisis 3 at acceptable frame rates at the native resolution. So I've seen people complain about the 1366 by 768 display on the Razer Edge. And my response to this is, well, what else were they supposed to do? It's not like they could put a Titan in here and I would rather have a lower resolution screen than deal with dithering. So if this had a 1080p screen, what you'd run into is you would have it downscaling in order to run at resolutions that the onboard GPU could handle. So you'd actually have to have... Did I say dithering? I think I meant interpolation. One way or another, they're bad things and you don't want to do either of those things. Yeah, interpolation. Sorry, my bad. It's an IPS display. So while it wasn't the most vibrant IPS display I've ever seen, there wasn't really any detectable motion blur or ghosting as it's colloquially referred to. So it delivered a very acceptable gaming experience. So we've got Dirt 3 going here. And this highlights sort of what I meant before when I said the lack of a physical keyboard hampers the gaming experience somewhat because how do I alt-enter? I don't know how to fullscreen a program without alt-enter. I rely on my keyboard a lot in a Windows environment and it's not the edge's fault, it's just the way Windows works. They expect you to control C, control V. So now that the game isn't in fullscreen, if the game itself doesn't have an option to go to fullscreen, then you're just kind of boned because you've got control, you've got... I don't know, where's like, can you shift? Where's shift tab? Because shift goes away when you go into the number pad here. So how do you get rid of something like a Steam overlay? It can be a little bit frustrating, but once you get past the issues that are present, so we're going to continue our race here. Whoops, I'm going backwards. There we go. The gaming experience is actually really cool. So I hope you can get in close enough that you can see this. I did turn the screen resolution up. So this is DiRT 3, which may not be the most hardcore title by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a totally acceptable gaming experience on a modern title that looks absolutely fantastic, which isn't going to prevent someone like me from crashing the car necessarily. So I'm going to go ahead and pause that and we'll move into... What's it like overall using this thing? So I was playing around with it for a couple days. Again, so more difficulty with things like an SNES emulator that runs in like DOS mode. So it was difficult to navigate through it with touch screen, things like that. But if you use Steam Big Picture, which I found to be not that bad of an experience, I wish that Steam Big Picture was a little bit more touch optimized, but we know how Gabe Newell feels about Windows 8 and all that noise. She'd kind of get over that and help us with the gaming experience as opposed to sit and be upset about it. But with Big Picture, it was a little bit better. It did make navigation a little bit easier. There are ways to add... Here we go. So I'll just click this button. There are ways to add your Steam games as tiles. So there's a couple of different apps that do that in the Windows 8 store. And it was pretty darn cool. The other things to look out for is some USB devices won't work with the game controller on because of the depth of the connector. However, I only had one in the house that had that issue. But check this out. Even though it adds some bulk to the keyboard... to the keyboard... to the headphone microphone jack, I was able to plug in right angle headphones without the mic not working or the headphones not working or whatever else like that. So what does all this mean, I guess? Graphics you can actually play PC games on in a tablet. Power that is really more equivalent to something like a low-end to mid-range gaming notebook in a form factor that is phenomenally impressive, looks beautiful... is different from anything else that's out there, but at a price where really you gotta pay to play. It's not cheap. If you want this unique device that is able to game in a tablet-like form factor, if you're willing to accept the hour and change of battery life that comes with it... when it's actually running games and the sort of, you know, three to three and a half hours that you're gonna get out of it when you're not running games... it is a completely unique experience that is unlike anything else. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and overview of the Razer Edge. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.