Acer announced the new Nitro Blaze 8 and massive Switch-like Nitro Blaze 11 gaming handhelds

It's raining gaming handhelds lately. Acer have now announced the New Nitro Blaze 8 and Nitro Blaze 11. Don't expect SteamOS / Linux on them though, sadly they're shipping with Windows 11. Never say never though, with Valve expanding SteamOS perhaps we may see Acer jump on board in future too.

This is not their first though, with the Nitro Blaze 7 being announced last year. Seems they saw enough interest to keep going, which is good to see for more competition.

The Acer Nitro Blaze 8 will have a 8.8" WQXGA touch panel with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 and 144Hz refresh rate, along with a AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS processor / AMD Radeon 780M graphics. For storage you get "up to" 2TB NVMe SSD and 16GB LPDDR5X memory at 7500MT/s. It has USB4, Type-C, and USB 3.2 ports, plus Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

Acer say it will be available "in North America in Q2, starting at USD 899, and in EMEA in Q2, starting at EUR 999".

Hilariously though, they're really pushing what's classed as handheld and portable with the Acer Nitro Blaze 11. This has a 10.95" WQXGA touchscreen with a 2560 x 1600 resolution, 120Hz refresh rate. It's a big one and looks somewhat ridiculous to hold. It also has the AMD Ryzen™ 7 8840HS processor / AMD Radeon 780M graphics, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM at 7500MT/s and "up to" 2TB NVMe SSD. Plus again USB4, Type-C, USB 3.2 ports, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3.

Pictured - Acer Nitro Blaze 11

Acer say it will be available "in North America in Q2, starting at USD 1,099, and in EMEA in Q2, starting at EUR 1,199".

As big as the Nitro 11 is, it could still make quite a nice gaming unit when you're travelling around if you have space to put the screen down on something. I cannot imagine trying to hold that up for long. Not a fan of the lines they've put on the controllers either, looks a bit silly really. But I guess they have to try and stand out and appeal to "the gamers" somehow huh.