Every PC manufacturer is, unsurprisingly, making their own gaming handheld now. It makes sense, considering the growing potential and the general excitement around the category. The Acer Nitro Blaze 7 is the latest to join the fray.

Most new gaming handhelds that come out debut a standout feature to set themselves apart from the rest of the pack (e.g. the ASUS ROG Ally X

, for instance, packs in extra RAM). In the case of this device, the only really different thing is the inclusion of AMD’s newer AI chips, which should give this dedicated AI processing capabilities. What they put in that AI chip for, though, isn’t really clear, especially since it’s not exactly something a gaming handheld will particularly need.

The Acer Nitro Blaze 7 is a gaming handheld sporting a 7-inch IPS display with 1080p resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and 100 percent sRGB coverage. To ensure smooth onscreen action, the screen gets a 144Hz refresh rate with variable refresh rate available via AMD FreeSync Premium. Response time is listed at seven milliseconds, too, so your in-game actions should be immediately reflected onscreen as soon as you press a button or pull a trigger.

It has an asymmetric layout for the two Hall Effect thumb sticks, a D-pad, four action buttons, two shoulder buttons, and two Hall Effect triggers, so you get erstwhile standard gamepad controls. Unlike most modern gaming handhelds, this one doesn’t have any paddle buttons in the back, opting to stick with a more traditional control layout instead. Is that a big deal? It depends. We know a lot of people who barely put those paddle buttons to use, but you’ll definitely miss it if you like with those extra controls within reach.

The Acer Nitro Blaze 7 gets a little more generous with its system buttons. You get a power button with biometric reader, volume buttons, a menu button, a view button, a dedicated button for bringing up Acer’s launch screen, a quick menu button, a mode switch, and a pop-up keyboard button we really appreciate that makes typing on this just a little more convenient. There is no touchpad, by the way, so you have to rely on touchscreen controls for navigating the OS and apps, although it does get two USB-C 4.0 slots, so you get one more than what most handhelds offer.

As far as the core specs go, the device runs a on an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS with AMD Radeon 780M graphics, 16GB of RAM, and an AMD Ryzen AI chip for inferencing, though we’re not exactly sure what functions that latter chip will find use on. For storage, it houses a 2TB SSD, so you can load it with a decent amount of AAA titles, with a microSD card for expanding the storage as needed. Other features include a 50Wh battery, dual 1W speakers, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3. It runs on Windows and comes with three free months of PC Game Pass.

No pricing or release dates have been announced for the Acer Nitro Blaze 7, but it’s expected to come out later in the year.

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