You wait all year for a super-expensive gaming keyboard with touchscreen controls and then two turn up at once. Following hot on the crazy-priced heels of the Mad Catz STRIKE 7 comes this ultra stylish, ultra techie riposte from peripherals guru Razer. Like the STRIKE 7 it comes with a touchscreen interface, but aside from that and the £250 price tag, they are almost entirely different takes on the gaming keyboard. Whereas the Mad Catz look is all rounded-off angles, Meccano-like configurability and stealth-fighter chic, the DeathStalker Ultimate is a matte black slab of stylish gaming goodness. The chopped-off corners stop it being a plain rectangle, but the flat frame and low-profile chiclet keys give it a rather more subtle look than the Mad Catz board. That said, you've still got the multi-coloured LED backlight shining through the keys, and your eye will always be drawn to the touchscreen trackpad that sits where the numpad ought to live. That trackpad almost manages to justify the DeathStalker Ultimate's enormous price. The STRIKE 7 had potential (if developers managed to get something interesting out of its resistive touchscreen, which they still haven't), but the Razer has impressive functionality right out of the box. My Windows installation recognised it as a trackpad even before I installed the Synapse 2.0 software from Razer. Synapse tracking Once the Synapse application is in there, things get even better. There are already various interesting little tools for t
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