Has Acer just revealed the perfect gaming handheld for the cost of living crisis? The Nitro Blaze Link is a streaming-first companion for your existing laptop or PC rather than a standalone system. With just the hardware bare essentials inside, it should also be immune from skyrocketing RAM and SSD prices.
Low-power, streaming-first handhelds aren’t a new thing. The Logitech G Cloud has been doing the rounds for a few years now, while the PlayStation Portal is essentially the same deal but for PS5 owners rather than PC gamers. But as the cost of memory chips continues to skyrocket (thanks almost entirely to an artificial intelligence bubble that shows little sign of popping any time soon) rivals have been forced to dramatically up their prices. The Steam Deck OLED’s recent price hike was so wild Valve had to clarify it wasn’t a new model.
While Acer has yet to confirm exact pricing, the 7in Nitro Blaze Link is almost certain to undercut the competition by a considerable amount. The handheld itself has just 1GB of memory and 8GB of on-board storage, with no microSD expansion.
The chipset hadn’t even been revealed at the time of writing, but clearly the Blaze Link isn’t going to be doing very much on-device. It’ll instead use a combination of Sunshine and Moonlight, preinstalled on the Debian Linux-based operating system, to stream from a local PC. The two apps work together to render games on the beefier hardware and send the output as a video stream to the more lightweight device. Unsurprisingly Acer says pairing to a Predator or Nitro gaming laptop will be ‘seamless’, but it should play nicely with pretty much any Windows or Linux PC.
It’s not clear how long the 18Whr battery will last between charges.
The Blaze Link has Wi-Fi 6 on board for stutter-free streaming, and the lack of powerful hardware has helped keep the weight in check: at 464g it’s almost a third lighter than a Steam Deck OLED. The button layout sticks closely to the gaming handheld norm, but Acer says weight is evenly distributed across the device and that the grips either side of the 7in display are designed for maximum comfort.
The screen itself is a 1920×1200 panel with touch support. It’ll almost certainly use LCD tech, and there’s no word on brightness or refresh rate figures. It’s partnered with dual 2W stereo speakers and a 3.5mm headphone port for personal listening.
Hopefully Acer can bring the Nitro Blaze Link to gamers worldwide sooner rather than later. I’ll be looking out for it this week at Computex to give it the hands-on review treatment.
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