Razer Edge hands-on impressions (pictures)

Here's the packaging for everything Razer handed us today, including the tablet, the game pad accessory, a spare battery, and a docking station.

Razer's new Edge and accessories, unpacked.

The Edge tablet works as a standalone device, but the Core i7 model also includes a detachable game pad accessory. The spare battery pops into a small panel on the game pad.

Razer is keeping battery life promises realistic with the Edge. Because of the discrete graphics card, you should expect only an hour or so of portable gaming, and perhaps twice that with the battery add-on.

The docking station accessory gives you a few usage possibilities. You can set it up like a small-screen desktop, or like a game console or large-screen desktop if you connect it to a TV or a larger display.

The Edge measures roughly 0.75 inch thick, and weighs 2.14 pounds. By comparison, Apple's most recent 10-inch iPad weighs 1.44 pounds, and is only 0.37 inch thick.

The HDMI-out on the docking station gives the Edge its display versatility, and the three USB 3.0 jacks make it possible to plug in a mouse, a keyboard, and a game controller at the same time. The tablet itself provides another USB 3.0 port, but neither the Edge nor its docking station offers SD card inputs or an Ethernet jack. Razer will sell the latter as an external accessory.

You might not play games for too long with the Edge on battery power, but it's at least designed for the task.

The Edge defaults to extended-display mode when you connect it to a second screen. It also didn't scale properly to our Samsung television, requiring us to go in to the Nvidia graphics settings and manually adjust the aspect ratio.