Some of our favorite gaming handhelds, like the Lenovo Legion Go 2 and Steam Deck, now cost close to 50% more than they did a year ago. Hardware prices are enough to make game streaming seem more like a viable solution. Acer, with its Nitro Blaze Link handheld, imagines you’d rather stream your content from a PC than play it natively.
The Acer Nitro Blaze Link is being billed as a streaming-first handheld, akin to Sony’s PlayStation Portal but instead built specifically with PC gaming in mind. You may remember the $350 Logitech G Cloud, in which case you’ll have a better idea what Acer’s device is trying to accomplish. It’s a lightweight, 7-inch handheld that supports Wi-Fi 6. Acer expects users to use streaming software like Sunshine and Moonlight, which is what’s used in device-to-device streaming services like Razer Cortex. What’s more, the Nitro Blaze Link runs Linux, specifically the Debian distro. It’s only packing 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, so it’s practically useless for anything but streaming.
The Linux limitation means it may not even be compatible with Xbox Cloud Gaming at launch. Acer is not marketing the Nitro Blaze Link as an actual handheld PC like its upcoming Predator Atlas 8. That being said, expect it to cost far less than another handheld built for playing games natively. Acer says we’ll see it in Q4 this year, though it doesn’t have any word on pricing just yet.
In fact, Acer isn’t revealing any pricing details for any of its other gaming devices that you would need to make the Nitro Blaze Link work. Like other gaming laptops from this year, such as the 2026 Alienware 16 Area-51, the new Acer Predator Helios 18 is packing Intel’s latest Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor. The 290Hx Plus is Intel’s updated Arrow Lake chip that boosts gaming performance to a marginal degree. You can also pack this laptop with an Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU.
You can already guess this laptop prioritizes performance. For the sake of seeing your games in the best light, the Predator Helios 18 has an 18-inch mini LED display that supports two resolutions and refresh rates. You can run it at 4K and 120Hz or 1080p at the full 240Hz. Like last year’s laptop, the keyboard includes a swappable key system called MagKey 3.0. This means if you want mechanical switches for extra “thock” on your WASD keys, you don’t have to go out and buy a different, expensive laptop.
Of those Acer laptops that I went hands-on with before Computex 2026, perhaps my biggest surprise was the company’s new TravelMate P6 14 AI. It’s a black torpedo of a laptop that felt like a stealth bomber in my hands. The 14-inch laptop is made from a carbon fiber chassis that somehow weighs just 2.2 pounds. It’s packing up to an Intel Core Ultra X7 368H CPU, so it’s technically capable of gaming around 1080p resolution thanks to Intel’s Arc B390 integrated GPU.
The TravelMate P6 14 AI also sports an OLED display with a max resolution of 2,880 x 1,800, so it’s not a slouch in the looks department despite its size. Again, Acer hasn’t revealed pricing for any of its upcoming products. That’s concerning, since the TravelMate should be available in North America starting in August. If you want a gaming-capable PC, you’ll have to spend a chunk of change to get it.
Read the full article here
