Acer Joins the Portable Console Train with the New Nitro Blaze 7

If you thought the portable console market, competing with the Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, or Lenovo Legion Go, among many others, couldn’t get a new player, you were wrong. Acer just announced a new one Nitro Blaze 7the first device in this segment.

The Acer Nitro Blaze 7 has a fairly traditional design, and its technical specifications are also on par with its main competitors. It is clear that the manufacturer has played it safe in this first foray into the world of portable video game gadgets.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, although it leaves little room for differentiation in direct comparison with other equipment of its type. However, it is a welcome addition to a sector that has seen very significant growth in the last two years and is looking to continue expanding.

Acer equips Nitro Blaze 7 with IPS touchscreen 7 inches with a 1080p resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels), a 144Hz refresh rate, and a maximum brightness of 500 nits. Under the hood, the processor AMD Ryzen 7 8840HSaccompanied by a graphics processor AMD Radeon 780M and 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM. In terms of storage, the console offers up to 2TB of SSD storage and a microSD card reader.

The Acer Nitro Blaze 7 has a 50Wh battery and supports fast charging. up to 65 WUnfortunately, the manufacturer does not indicate how many hours of battery life it can provide during gaming sessions.

Nitro Blaze 7, Acer’s bet on the portable console segment

When it comes to connectivity and ports, the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 is pretty well-equipped. The device includes two USB-C (USB4) 40 Gbps portsone at the top and one at the bottom. It also features a 3.5mm headphone jack and supports Bluetooth 5.3 and WiFi 6E.

Perhaps the weakest point of the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 is its controls. While it does have the basic controls, it lacks customizable buttons on the back (almost standard for this type of hardware) and lacks touchpads front. It includes two levers, a control panel, ABXY buttons, triggers and buttons on the shoulders.

They have been supplemented with a power button with a fingerprint scanner, a volume control and buttons for quick actions for example, displaying the keyboard, opening the quick menu, or launching the Acer Game Space application, etc.

Main Features

On the software front, in addition to Windows 11 Home, the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 comes with the Acer Game Space app pre-installed. But that’s not all, as there’s also includes 3 months of PC Game Pass subscription.

Acer has not confirmed at this time. How much will it cost? its first portable console or when it will be released. This information may become official in the coming weeks.