Razer Announces Long-Overdue Peripheral Settings Cloud Service

In 2006, Razer released the world’s first gaming peripherals with built-in memory for storing profiles, and today, you would almost have to go out of your way to purchase a high-end gaming mouse without the same feature. Razer called its original implementation “Synapse”, and today, the company has announced its cloud-based counterpart, Synapse 2.0.

Citing the increasing costs of 64KB and 128KB flash chips due to recent floods near production facilities, on top of increasing demand from other manufacturers, Razer has decided to shift the profile-handling on all of its current and upcoming peripherals to its own servers, where storage is never an issue.

Ever wind up at a LAN party where the Razer peripherals are supplied? In this scenario, you could simply log into the Synapse 2.0 application and sync up. The peripherals might not be your own, but that doesn’t mean they can’t feel like your own.

Another plus becomes evident when you own more than one of a given peripheral. You could upload a perfectly-crafted profile on one, then download it to the other. Très simple.

As with all online services, Razer takes the security behind Synapse 2.0 seriously. In addition to your login password being encrypted with a strong MD5 hash, your profiles will be encrypted with AES-256, making sure that your competitors aren’t about to “borrow” the profile you spent so much time on refining. As an added measure, the software can be configured to lock all Razer peripherals at boot time – all except the numpad. After hitting the desktop, the Synapse 2.0 server will text message you a 4-digit code which you must type in, unlocking the hardware.

Overall, Razer’s Synapse 2.0 service looks to make on-board storage seem useless, and I look forward to giving it a go soon.

To be clear – almost all of this news post is made up. The product is not. That’s the funniest part.