(uplifting music)
- Hey, it's Chaim with The Verge, and I'm here at CES
with Razer's new Project Linda prototype.
Every year at CES, Razer always brings
a new and interesting prototype to kind of show off
some ideas for the future of computing.
This year's is Project Linda, which is a laptop dock
for the Razer phone.
Basically, take your Razer phone,
and you put it in the center of the laptop over here,
and you hit this docking button.
A USBC connector extends into the phone,
and it brings it up on the laptop
as a full laptop experience.
You can see those apps which are running in full desktop
or tablet mode.
Here's The Verge website.
You can still, there are hardware keys
to access things like Google Assistant
and hardware keys to access core Android functions,
like the back button and the app switcher.
You can also pop up games or productivity software,
like Lightroom, which runs in this tablet mode,
but this is, obviously, much more
of a usable work environment to get things done
than necessarily trying to do it on a phone.
Razer is eventually hoping to be able to develop this
to the point where you can actually run different content
on the two screens.
So, you can have, for example, Lightroom open
and have a palette picker on here.
You can plug in a mouse on the side,
but the idea is really to extend the capabilities
of what your phone can do into more of a laptop setting.
Instead of just mirroring the phone,
the Project Linda prototype actually also charges it
while it's plugged in.
The idea being that when you're using it on the laptop,
when you take it out, your phone will have more charge
than when you started.
The Project Linda prototype also has roughly 200 gigabytes
of extra space so you can store more stuff.
Ports-wise, you have a USBC port and a headphone jack
on one side, a full-sized USB type A port on the other side.
So, you can plug in any, basically, any peripheral
that's supported by an Android phone.
So, flash drives, mice, keyboards, et cetera,
and there's a headphone jack, which is always nice.
There's no speakers on the device
because it takes advantage of the front-facing speakers
on the Razer phone itself, which is a clever repurposing,
and instead of using the camera though,
there is a webcam and mic built into the top
so that people aren't looking up your nose
while you're having a Skype conversation.
It's still unclear whether or not
Razer will actually be bringing this to market.
Razer has done a lot of prototypes at CES.
Some of them make it to market, some of them don't.
Some of them end up informing other products
that do make it to market.
So, it's still in development,
and there is no idea of knowing whether or not
we'll actually see it make the final cut,
but for now, it's a really interesting prototype
to extend your phone,
especially as phones become more powerful.
The inside is a soft-touch coating.
So, that doesn't damage the phone,
and you can kind of see how it works.
Just really, really cool and really fun to play with.