So you think Razer sells overpriced expensive mouses? Have a look at the wireless Titanium ID mouse. It's made out of grade 1 titanium (yeah, that's right not that cheapo B-grade titanium everyone else uses) has a neodymium scroll wheel and costs about 800 Euros. Not much information about the actual optical technology other than it's laser powered and bluetooth. If you're interested it will be on display at the millionaire fair in Amsterdam later this year. Guess that says it all...

Microsoft Research is presenting their ideas of the next generation of mouse interfaces: It's a combination of multitouch and mouse technology featureing different approaches as Side, Orb, Cap and my personal favourite: the FTIR mouse, which stands for frustrated total internal reflection and uses an internal infrared camera and light source to track your fingers movement on the transparent mouse surface. Let's hope that 'rustrated' does not also describe the final customer experience. Sometime engineers go a bit crazy with technology and forget the actual purpose, moving a cursor on a screen. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to know if Razer his working on similar approaches. Head over to mixxedbag for more information on this.

Bad news which will be of concern to anyone who has downloaded and/or installed Razer drivers in recent times: it seems Razer's support site was compromised and that downloads potentially infect Windows with WORM.ASPXOR.AB.

From the support site:

Update 22nd September 2009: Razer was alerted of an malicious attack to our support site this past weekend (19th September) by a malware virus or trojan. We had earlier taken down the support page for the past 24 hours to ensure all issues were resolved. If you have downloaded and installed drivers or firmware from www.razersupport.com from the 19th of September 2009, it is recommended that you visit one of the following sites for a free virus scan:

• AVG 8.5 - Download direct from download.com
• Avira Antivirus - Download direct from download.com
• Trend Micro Housecall - http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
• Avast Antivirus - Download direct from download.com

If you have been affected due to this incident, please write in to us directly at http://help.razersupport.com/us-en/email.asp or submit in a support ticket. We are also in the process of restoring all of our driver files and firmware. If you come across a broken link to a file, do write in to us at http://help.razersupport.com/us-en/email.asp with the subject "Missing file". We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

For more information, see Razer downloads distributing malware.

We are now able to post the second and final part of our interview with Robert Krakoff at GamesCom 2009. Read on for the answers to the remainder of your questions, which deal with keyboards, the Pro line of products, wireless audio and Linux drivers.

BP: Many users love traditional high-quality quality mechanical keyboards, with standard key layouts and full-size keys.  However, modern gaming keyboards are nearly all "soft-touch", many are "low-profile" and some have more cramped key layouts. Would Razer consider releasing a traditional mechanical keyboard with some of the more useful gaming keyboard features - think IBM Type-M with full anti-ghosting and back lighting?

RG: What you are describing is...

Read the rest of this article

Having seen the Naga and Megasoma announced a couple of days previously, we interviewed Robert "Razerguy" Krakoff, president of Razer, during Friday afternoon of the gaming trade fair in Cologne. Most of the questions were from our members - thank you for thinking of them and posting them for us to use.

BP: Congratulations on the Naga. In light of that, does Razer have plans to release a new mouse for non-MMO, FPS players?

RG: Oh, there will always be...

Read the rest of this article

Razer Blueprints got access to the business day (Wednesday the 19th of August) of GamesCom 2009 to be present at the Razer press conference. We'd heard Razer would be announcing two new products, but we didn't know what kind of products they would be and we were kept guessing right up until the unveiling itself.

We were planning to tweet live from the press conference in order to get the word out to those who weren't watching the live stream, but the night before we had some trouble with Twitter (who would have thought?); it didn't seem to want to validate our mobile for text tweeting. Fortunately, DarkPeanut tried again later on Wednesday and it worked. If you're not already following Razer Blueprints at Twitter, find our tweets at http://twitter.com/razerblueprints/

Read the rest of this article

Two Blueprints team members were present at GamesCom 2009 today. Look out for the report and photos of Razer's press conference as well as other sights at the event tomorrow morning.

For now, see Razer's two new product pages, both of which were announced to the world today: the Naga and the Megasoma.