Razer's First Smartphone Teased Ahead Of November 1st Debut

Either Razer is faking everyone out on the web, or the peripheral maker is getting ready to unveil its very first smartphone in a few weeks. The company teased the latter, both on its website and on Twitter, by posting a picture of young man excitedly holding what appears to be a smartphone, the glow of which splashes onto his neck and lower portion of his face, and on the wall behind him.

The images teases fans to watch for Razer calls its "biggest unveiling," which is scheduled for November 1, 2017, just a little less than three weeks from now. If that piques your curiosity, you can input your name, country of origin, and email address to receive updates from Razer. Or you could bounce back to the website (or here on HotHardware, as we will be covering the news) on November 1 to see what all of the fuss is about.
Razer's foray into smartphone territory was an inevitable eventuality the moment it acquired Nextbit earlier this year for an undisclosed sum. Nextbit, you might recall, had previously launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for its cloud-based Robing smartphone. Razer halted sales of the device after purchasing the startup, presumably to work on a more gaming-centric handset.

It is also possible that Razer is readying a dedicated mobile gaming device, but that seems unlikely. This is especially true considering that Tom Moss, SVP and GM of Mobile at Razer who previously served in those roles at Nexbit, tweeted out a picture of Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan sporting what also appears to be a Razer phone, shown slightly protruding from his pocket.
Barring the aforementioned fake out, the question is not what product Razer is getting ready to announce, but what hardware will it have inside, and what unique features will it bring to the table. Assuming it is focused on gaming, Razer would be wise to roll with a high-end chipset with a strong GPU, something like Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip (SoC).

It will also be interesting to see what platform tweaks Razer has in store. We suspect this will run a custom version of Android to maintain compatibility with a robust app library, though if a curveball is thrown, this would be one area it could come from.