The final keyboard dock is slated for Q3, and will likely look pretty similar to the one shown previously (though with a substantially different latching mechanism). I know that Min was using one during the show, but it looked like the primary intent of those hand-built preproduction units was to have the keyboard dock on display and not necessarily in a usable form. Back in January, it was a really rough build – the keyboard was tiny, there was tons of flex, the hinge was questionable, and the mechanism to keep it closed was a very high tech elastic band. The only remaining piece of the puzzle is the keyboard dock, which we saw displayed in very early preproduction form at CES. Now, I’m not going to give up the M18x I’m currently using at my desk, but if you had to use a tablet as your primary machine, wouldn’t the Edge be very close to the top of your list? This is one of the few tablets powerful enough that I could use it as a main day to day work machine, especially in the i7/8GB/256GB configuration I have here.
Connected to an external display and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it makes for a decent setup. The desktop use case is the other one where the dock is ideally suited.
If you just leave the dock hooked up to the TV and controllers, it’s really easy to just drop the tablet into it when you want to play. I spent an evening with some of Razer’s marketing guys playing Dirt Showdown on a docked Edge hooked up to a 60” TV and a few Sabertooths, and the Edge acquitted itself well in this type of situation. But if you’re willing to play at the native resolution of the tablet and not the native res of the TV, it’s a pretty enjoyable way to game.
This goes back to GT 640M LE being not suited at all to gaming at resolutions above that – running new games at 1080p on anything lower than a GT 650M can be a bit painful. It worked pretty well, though it’s worth mentioning that the displays were mirrored at 1366x768. Razer had a number of Edges set up as consoles at CES both in their booth as well as in their meeting room suite – they also announced the Sabertooth controller for Xbox 360 at CES, so it made for a nice two-in-one product showcase. There are two primary use cases for the dock that I can see it serving pretty well – hooked up to a TV and Xbox controllers in what Razer calls “console mode”, as well as at a desk with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
The lack of USB 3.0 ports is related to a bandwidth limitation for the dock connector and not a case of Razer being cheap with their port selection, though I’d still have liked to see at least one of the three ports be USB 3.0. It’s worth stating this again, but the dock is actually the *only* way to get video out from the tablet. The back has a power connector, separate 3.5mm jacks for line in and audio out, an HDMI port, and three USB 2.0 ports. The docking station is pretty simple, just a wedge-shaped plastic part with a rubberized base that features a dock connector and two pins to hold the Edge in place.