Valve reveals Steam Controller, the companion for Steam Machines

6:15 PM

When Valve announced its Steam Machines initiative on Wednesday, the company also said that it would soon reveal more about how gamers would interact with these new consoles, which are designed to bring the PC gaming experience to your living room television. Gamers didn’t have long to wait, as Valve revealed the Steam Controller on Friday as the last announcement in its week-long spree of reveals about Steam in the living room. Valve’s controller is a radical redesign of the typical console controller, designed to work with every single PC game to date and games that have yet to launch as well.

The Steam Controller has two circular, clickable trackpads that Valve says will approach the functionality of a desktop mouse.

“Whole genres of games that were previously only playable with a keyboard and mouse are now accessible from the sofa,” Valve claims.

The center of the controller will be occupied by a touch screen that Valve says “allows an infinite number of discrete actions to be made available to the player, without requiring an infinite number of physical buttons.”

The Steam Controller will keep the ABXY buttons that have been present on console controllers for years, but other than those familiar letters, Valve’s input device looks like something entirely new. The controller will also be hackable, continuing Valve’s theme of openness for its living room products. Check out the first official image of the controller below.

Patent filing reveals an interesting keyboard from Samsung

As much as tablets are useful, one thing remains true. The bigger the tablet the harder it is to type, onscreen keyboards are just a nightmare stretched across a 10? screen. It’s never as easy as typing on a laptop.

As Samsung have quite a few different laptop models it was only a matter of time before they started to converge. We saw the first tablet and keyboard models earlier on the year with a variety of Windows 8 devices and the funky Ativ Q, a Windows and Android hybrid that might not ever appear.

A patent has been granted to Samsung that shows a rather cool design for a folding keyboard. It seems that the tablet would be insert into the middle of the keyboard and then used like a Ultrabook. The keyboard appears to have a kickstand on the back too and also looks like it could close up and act as a case.

All interesting stuff, which we can only hope will make it to the real world.

Source – SamMobile