Razer just refreshed one of the more niche gadgets in gaming, and honestly I have a soft spot for these things. The Tartarus V2 Pro is a one-handed keypad aimed at MMO and FPS players, 31 programmable keys and a built-in analog thumbstick, per Hypebeast. It runs $199.99 in the US and £199.99 in the UK.

If you've never used one, the pitch is simple: your left hand stops stretching across a full keyboard and instead gets every input you need clustered under your fingertips. The thumbstick handles movement the way a console player would, which frees your keys up for abilities, macros, weapon swaps. MMO players have loved these for years, and it makes sense, when you have 40 keybinds and a rotation to maintain, physical clustering genuinely helps.

The analog part is what makes this a "Pro" upgrade worth paying attention to. An analog stick outputs variable values, so a gentle push means a gentle walk in-game and a full deflection means a sprint. As a developer that distinction matters to me, because analog input is a completely different data pipeline, and getting it to feel right alongside keyboard-grade key response is not a trivial engineering problem. I've fought with input handling enough times to respect anyone who pulls that off. Razer's been pushing analog input hard across its lineup, and this feels like the natural endpoint of that.

The 31 keys are all programmable through Razer's software, and this is where the MMO crowd does the real customization. Dedicated push-to-talk, a dedicated heal macro, a paging layer that doubles your effective key count, the works. FPS players use these a bit differently, leaning on the thumbstick for peeking and strafing while keeping aim on the mouse. Sounds weird until you see someone who's good at it.

One thing worth flagging from a design perspective: one-handed keypads live or die on ergonomics. Your wrist sits at a fixed angle for hours, and the wrist rest and key spacing either work for your hand or they don't. There's no way to know from a spec sheet which camp you fall into.

At two hundred bucks this is very much an enthusiast purchase, but that's always been the Tartarus deal. And if you do pick one up, give yourself a week before judging it. Everyone I know who stuck with a Tartarus hated it for the first three days and couldn't go back to a full keyboard after a month. Muscle memory is a stubborn thing... but it pays off when it rewires.