Acer has long been a PC brand that dabbles in just about all segments of the market including gaming, and now it has expanded to handheld gaming PCs with the introduction of the Nitro Blaze 7. Handheld gaming PCs have exploded over the past couple of years with the arrival of the Steam Deck back in 2022. And thanks to Valve’s efforts, today’s top gaming hardware manufacturers have all tried their hands at entering into this space with devices of their own.
ASUS was the first major brand to come to market with a competitor with the release of the ROG Ally. This was followed by Lenovo with the Legion Go, then MSI with the MSI Claw. ASUS then launched another handheld, the ROG Ally X, featuring a bunch of quality-of-life improvements and small but meaningful hardware updates. Then you have the handhelds from all the smaller brands like AYANEO, GPD, and ONEXPLAYER. All of them offer unique takes on the market, and all contribute to the rising popularity of handheld PC gaming.
Now there’s Acer. Well-known for its Predator and Nitro gaming products, the last time Acer really tried anything of this nature was with the Predator Android tablet. A short-lived endeavor to be sure. But it likely got Acer thinking about the benefits of having a gaming device that could easily move around with you. The Nitro Blaze 7 of course, is no Android device. It’s a fully-fledged Windows 11 PC. Which means access to all your PC games wherever you are.
Will the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 be able to stand out from the crowd?
The big question is whether or not the Nitro Blaze 7 will be able to stand out enough. Acer makes great gaming hardware. But so do MSI and Lenovo, and neither of those handhelds has been nearly as popular as the Steam Deck or ROG Ally/ROG Ally X. The Nitro Blaze 7 does stand out visually thanks to a few key design choices. Namely, the decision to give it some red accents and these big speedometer-looking aesthetics on the back. It also comes with up to 2TB of internal storage and has a 144Hz refresh rate display. Which is slightly faster than the ROG Ally X.
However, the Nitro Blaze 7 does lack some of the better features of other offerings. For instance, it has no back buttons that you can remap the face controls to. A strange decision given that essentially every other handheld gaming PC has them. It’s also using the same GPU as more than a few competitors – the AMD Radeon 780M GPU. It does use a newer Ryzen 7 8840HS CPU though. The Full HD display is also 7 inches which puts it right up there with most other options. Additionally, it has 16GB of LPDDR5x 7500 MT RAM for higher data transfer rates.
One neat design detail is that one of the two USB4 ports is on the bottom, which will make it very convenient to charge this handheld and play at the same time.
Acer will need to be aggressive with the price
Acer hasn’t announced any pricing or availability details for the Nitro Blaze 7 yet. Having said that, aggressive pricing is how Acer can probably ensure the Nitro Blaze 7 is a popular and successful handheld gaming PC. The Steam Deck OLED comes with something really no other handheld has. The OLED display. It’s also only $650 for the 1TB model. And it plays games well while having arguably the best user interface on the market.
The ROG Ally X, meanwhile, has 24GB of RAM, a 120Hz display, 1TB of storage space, and a surprisingly comfortable ergonomic feel. All for $800. Not to mention the 80Wh battery for probably the best battery life of any of the handhelds. With all of that in mind, the Nitro Blaze 7 will need to hit the market with a very exciting price point to grab gamers. If it’s more expensive than the ROG Ally X, it might be a tough sell. However, the 2TB of storage space might be enough to pull consumers in if it’s $800. Even more so if it’s less than that.
2024-09-05 15:10:56