ASUS Republic of Gamers has announced its newest gaming unit, the ASUS ROG GT51CA, and it is reputed to be a king-of-the-jungle beast. It’s faster—well, that goes without saying in the gaming world—with 6th generation Intel Core i7 processor you can overclock to 4.6gHz (no rebooting), can take up two 2 Titan X graphics cards, so great resolution, has a cooling system for the CPU, and dedicated air channels for the graphics cards and power supply.
And then it has this quirky little extra: a wrist band — the languid wave of which will take the gamer in overclocking mode or will open a hidden hard drive space for personal data.
Here’s the thing about that wrist band: The technology has a lot of much more interesting and useful applications: security functions such as accessing bank information, opening your hotel room, unlocking weapons only for approved users, insurance purposes, and digital payment systems. Or maybe such more mundane things as unlocking your house or your car door when you’re carrying two shopping bags and trying to get a hyperactive dog into the back seat.
To use a technology with such potentially powerful uses to open a hidden hard drive partition or speed up a game seems, well, like hunting mosquitoes with an elephant gun. It also doesn’t seem like all that much of a selling point for the hardcore gamer. Except maybe one with poorly guarded secrets.