The keyboard chassis is light and durable, sporting shallow chiclet-style keys that look great but feel shallow. A rubberized wrist rest along the lower edge attracts dust and crumbs like a vacuum but keeps you comfortable during extended typing sessions. Like most Razer keyboards the is fully programmable, and includes five extra macro keys on the left edge, a dedicated on-the-fly macro recording key, and a gaming mode key that functions as a toggle which disables the Windows key (and the Alt+Tab and Alt+F4 key combinations, if you like). Alongside these Razer staples you'll find a new key sporting the Razer logo, which you can tap to revert the LCD trackpanel and accompanying keys built into the right side of the chassis back to their default interface.
The standout feature of the DeathStalker Ultimate is the Switchblade user interface, ten programmable LED keys and a 4-inch LCD multi-touch trackpanel built into the right side of the keyboard. By default the keys are bound to common tasks like logging into Twitter or launching a calculator app (and they sport equally common-place icons) but you can customize them to do pretty much anything with the Razer Synapse 2.0 device management software.
It's a really neat gimmick that works surprisingly well without a lot of setup time. The trackpanel works well for basic navigational tasks (selecting and editing files, navigating a web browser, etc.) and works as well as just about any laptop trackpad I've tested; the gesture controls are a nice touch that let you pull off tricks like propelling your browser backwards or forwards through your browsing history by swiping three fingers left and right. You will need to download the Razer Synapse software in order to take advantage of the dynamic keys and adaptive screen, though; otherwise, it's just a fancy trackpanel with a glowing Razer logo.
As of this writing the Razer Synapse driver software is easy to download and frustrating to use. Conceptually, it's great: download Synapse and create a free Razer account, then customize your peripherals and your settings will be saved to Razer servers automatically, meaning you can take your Razer gear anywhere and simply download Synapse to have access to your custom configuration. In practice, Synapse runs slowly and sports an unintuitive interface. Most frustrating of all, during testing Synapse had a hard time reliably detecting Razer peripherals; while testing the DeathStalker Ultimate I had to install Razer Synapse three times across three different PCs, and each time I had problems convincing the software that I had in fact connected our review keyboard. I was able to solve the problem on all of our test machines by either rebooting the PC or reinstalling the software, but it was always a headache. I've never had this problem with Synapse while testing other Razer peripherals, so it may be an issue with the DeathStalker Ultimate; if so, a driver update may have solved the problem by the time you read this.