Did you know that I was the first journalist to publish real-life photos of the terminally-vaporware Phantom Gaming Service when it was shown at E3 2004? That's my claim to fame, what's yours?

Since then I've been following the product and the company pretty closely, and while I (like everybody) knew they were going to fail (if they were even trying) I kept saying that if they wanted to get anything out of their R&D money they should just sell their "Lapboard" peripheral, since it was the only thing about the Phantom that really impressed me.

It's an age-old problem. Some people, God love'em, refuse to adapt to two-thumbed gamepad control for first person shooters on consoles and insist on using keyboard + mouse. Trouble is, if you're playing from a couch and not a desk, where do you put the keyboard or the mouse?

Infinium, now "Phantom Entertainment," solved that problem rather well. You put the device on your lap, tilt the keyboard up so that the whole thing is shaped like a V, and use the mouse on the lower surface while your other hand gently fondles the WASD keys. If you're a left-handed freak, the actual keyboard swivels around 180 degrees so you can flip the lapboard around and play it southpaw. It's simple, elegant, and surprisingly comfortable.

Apparently they heard me, because they're selling the thing now. Problem is, it's only "for" the PC and Mac, not the major consoles (which confuses me, because the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 both have USB keyboard and mouse support; they must require you to use their spyware-infused hardware drivers), so the only people I could see this being for are the ones who like to really lean back in their desk chairs when they play PC games or the 12 or so people out there with computers connected to their home theaters and try to play games on them (like my brother).

The thing costs $130, which might seem like a lot on account of it being so, and the only place to buy it currently is directly from Phantom's website (which has an expired SSL certificate), which may seem shady on account of you not being an idiot. 

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