As we all hesitantly await the announcement of the Nintendo Switch 2, marking the entry into the next generation of handheld gaming, one last brand decided to jump the gun and do it for them.
Acer held its GPC, or Global Press Conference, on Wednesday afternoon. During the conference, they announced a multitude of new devices, from Swift Go AI-powered laptops to new cooling technologies and even their partnership with a Japanese design brand. Still, one of the show’s main highlights was the announcement of the Acer Nitro Blaze 7.
The Acer Blaze Nitro 7 packs a 7-inch Full HD touchscreen IPS display with AMD FreeSync support, 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM, can hold up to 2TB of storage and comes standard with two USB-C ports. There will also be a Micro-SD card slot and a 3.4mm audio jack for some wired headphones.
Of course, it will have an Acer-branded overlay to access all your games and feature a layout very similar to that of the current generation of handhelds.
What separates the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 from the rest of the pack, however, is its CPU. While most of this generation’s handhelds are running on AMD’s Z1 range of processors, with the ROG Ally running the Z1 Extreme, the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 will run an AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS. The AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS is similar to the Z1 Extreme on paper, except for one significant difference. This CPU was built with AI in mind. Featuring 39 AI TOPS, almost reaching the same sort of AI power we’re seeing in Co-pilot + laptops, the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 will launch completely AI-ready, giving it a slight upper hand as technology quickly gets more and more enumerated with the era of artificial intelligence.
This almost positions the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 as more of a dockable workstation with attached gaming peripherals than an outright gaming handheld.
All the added AI TOPS do mean a price jump, though. We expect the Acer Nitro Balze 7 to hit the market close to the R20,000 price point. This should place it near the Asus ROG Ally X, which currently sits at around R18,000.
Acer South Africa hopes to get a few of these handheld beasts to our shores before Christmas this year, but with so many factors between us and the factory, like an incredibly long journey by ship, we might only see the device early next year.
With all the other brands having already released their handhelds, What do you think about Acer’s latest dive into the gaming sphere? Let us know in the comments below.