$1,300?! Company launches obscenely expensive tablet

Razer's crowdsourced gaming tablet. (Razer)

If Razer’s innovative Project Fiona gaming tablet fails, we’ll have nobody to blame but ourselves. In an intriguing twist, Razer has crowdsourced (via its Facebook page) some of the slate’s major elements, starting with whether or not it should even be built and even going so far as to let fans choose the actual hardware layout for the machine.

Razer recently announced which innards and features “we” picked for the physical-control-wielding tablet. In a nutshell: Project Fiona will definitely be able to get its PC game on.

Gamers voted to stock the Windows tablet with either a Core i5 or Core i7 CPU and a mid-range graphics card capable of playing games well at mid-range graphics settings. With a spec sheet like that, Project Fiona will definitely run Crysis – though maybe not Crysis 3. The real question, however, is how long the tablet’s battery can last running full-blown PC games under load.

The crowd also indicated that it would be willing to put up with a tablet up to twice as thick as the iPad, as long as its physical control handles were removable during non-fragful moments.

The recently announced Archos GamePad also sports physical controls, but it’s a low-cost Android tablet built for modest mobile gaming. As it stands, Project Fiona is more like a proper gaming laptop in a tablet form factor – and will have a price tag to match. Voters said they’d be willing to pay between $1,299 and $1,499 for the tablet. We expect Razer to hold them to the offer, though we’re a bit skeptical about Project Fiona’s potential sales success with such a sky-high cost.