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Roccat demos Power-Grid iPhone companion app for PC gaming (video)

Roccat demos Power-Grid iPhone companion app for PC gaming (video)

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Hands-on impressions of Roccat's new Power-Grid iOS app and prototype Project Apuri dock.

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After announcing his company's new Power-Grid app for iOS earlier this week, Roccat CEO Rene Korte spent some time with us showing off its capabilities. Power-Grid will offer extended gaming controls alongside your traditional keyboard and mouse setup. The free app consists of three pre-installed control grids: Incoming Center, Stats Control, and Sound Control. The Incoming Center pulls in voice and text from TeamSpeak, Skype, Twitter, and more, and displays all the text from the services in a scrolling feed. It's pretty flexible, and you're free to remove anything from the app on the fly. The Stats Control brings up your system information including CPU stats, RAM usage, network traffic, and hard drive space. The final pre-installed grid is Sound Control, which mirrors Windows audio mixer giving you full control over the volume of individual apps on your PC, as well as providing a basic media player remote. While the three options are pretty interesting by themselves, the feature most likely to attract attention however is the fourth: user-customizable grids.

The grids can be built using free software on your PC and are completely versatile. On display were timers, macros (specifically for Skyrim in this case), and app and web shortcuts, but the possibilities are virtually endless. While the first custom grid is free, additional grids will cost 99 cents (although you will be able to change your free grid as much as you like without paying). The app connects to your PC via Wi-Fi and response was completely lag free to the naked eye. This really looks to be a great expansion option for PC gamers on a budget. The app is going into public beta in the next few weeks and should be available at some point in the second half of the year alongside an Android version. Roccat is open to the idea of developing an app for Windows Phone, but only if Microsoft manages to achieve "sufficient market penetration."

Roccat Power-Grid and Project Apuri photos

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Also on display was a prototype of Roccat's upcoming Project Apuri dock, which will launch at around €30 ($40) for both iPhone and Android phones towards the end of the year. While it's only a simple charging dock with a blue light underneath it felt extremely well put together, and holds the phone at a good angle for use with the Power-Grid app. When asked why the dock will take so long to be released, Korte explained that he's expecting the next iPhone to be announced in September. He would like to be sure there aren't any major form-factor or dock connector changes before going ahead with mass production. Roccat is also planning to release a mechanical keyboard called Project Phobo which will have a pop-out num pad that can be replaced with the phone of your choice. Unfortunately there weren't any prototypes available for us to take a look at, but we'll bring you plenty of coverage before it launches early next year for around $130.

Roccat Power Grid and Project Phobo press pictures

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