CES 2025: The Acer Nitro Blaze 11 gaming handheld is a gigantic Nintendo Switch

If CES 2025 is anything to go by, this year could well be the year of the Windows-based gaming handheld, especially with news emerging from the show of Acer’s new launches.

The Taiwanese company has unveiled a pair of new consoles, both of which are built around AMD Ryzen 8000 chips, with the larger option stretching the very definition of the term “handheld”. The Acer Nitro Blaze 11, as the name suggests, comes with an 11in display set between a pair of detachable controllers, just like a gigantic Nintendo Switch.

Those controllers feature a pair of analogue sticks, shoulder buttons and analogue triggers, a pair of rear trigger buttons, A, B, X and Y buttons on the right-hand controller and a four-way D-pad on the left. There’s a kickstand that folds out at the rear so you can prop up the screen on a table or desk, too.

I’d say that was pretty much essential given how big this thing is. It’s fairly hefty at just over 1kg in weight, measures a chunky 364 x 171 x 15.9mm (WDH), and your arms are going to get pretty tired holding it up for a long gaming session.

The screen isn’t OLED, more’s the pity – imagine how good that would look at this size – but it is sharp with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels, has a peak brightness of 500 nits and covers 98% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut. It’s powered by an 8-core/16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS CPU with AMD Radeon 780M graphics, 16GB of RAM and up to 2TB of SSD storage.

My main source of worry is the rather small battery. At 55Wh it’s a good deal smaller in capacity than the ROG Ally X, and in the words of Andy White, who reviewed both the ROG Ally and its successor, the Ally X, that screen is going to “rinse” the battery. I wouldn’t disagree. 

We don’t have prices or release dates for Acer’s giant just yet but we do for the more practical model: the Acer Nitro Blaze 8, which will be available in March and cost 999 Euros.

The Acer Nitro Blaze 8 has a similar design to the Blaze 11, just in a smaller package weighing 720g and measuring 305 x 134 x 22mm (WDH). The screen is still a comparatively large 8.8in across the diagonal, but it has the same 2,560 x 1,600 pixels so it’s sharper than the larger handheld and it has a higher 144Hz refresh rate, too.

With the same size 55Wh battery, each mobile gaming session should last a little longer than the bigger device, but surprisingly, there’s no kickstand or removable controllers. This is a gaming handheld that’s much more similar to the ROG Ally and Ally X.

READ NEXT: ROG Ally vs ROG Ally X

The buttons, triggers and sticks follow the same configuration as the larger device and power is provided by the same silicon, too, with an 8-core/16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS CPU, an AMD Radeon 780M GPU, 16GB of RAM and up to a 2TB SSD.

We can’t wait to get our hands on these two if they come to the UK later this year, although we can’t see many people opting for the bigger device.