IFA 2024 | Acer Nitro Blaze handheld console announced with last-gen AMD APU and 2 TB NVMe SSD

Acer has entered the hypercompetitive handheld gaming console market with its offering: the Acer Nitro Blaze. It joins the long list of consoles powered by AMD hardware (and not Lunar Lake as previously speculated), but instead of using a trusty Ryzen Z1 Extreme, it opts for a Hawk Point-based Ryzen 7 8840HS, complete with a Radeon 780M iGPU.

Under the hood, the Acer Nitro Blaze comes with a whopping 2 TB of storage (2230 NVMe SSD) and 16 GB of 7500 MT/s LPDDR5x RAM. A 50 Wh battery powers the console, which can be charged with a 65 Watt USB-C charger. This is identical to the Steam Deck OLED's battery capacity, and it'll be interesting to see how both consoles fare in battery life.

Moving on to the screen, you get a 7-inch FHD (1,920 x 1,080) IPS LCD panel with a refresh rate of 144 Hz, 500 nits brightness, 100% sRGB colour gamut coverage and 7 ms reaction time. Acer claims it is a native landscape panel. Plus, you get two USB Type-C (USB 4.0) ports on the console, similar to what MSI has planned with its next-gen Lunar Lake-powered Claw 8 AI.

Looks-wise, the Acer Nitro Blaze, for the most part, looks like a bog-standard Windows handheld, with two front-firing speakers, a microSD card slot, standard D-pad/thumbstick positions and a few extra buttons on the front. Unfortunately, Acer hasn't specified what each one does, but the one with the Nitro logo looks like something that could be used to control the CPU's wattage and the likes.

Unfortunately, there seem to be no signs of back paddles on the Acer Nitro Blaze and it is restricted to Wi-Fi 6E instead of Wi-Fi 7. While they're not useful for most users, an extra set of mappable keys is always useful in an input-limited environment. As far as prices go, Acer says it will reveal them later.