Acer jump the portable shark with an 11-inch Blaze handheld at CES

All sorts of silly and cool ideas emerge from CES, but the trend is generally toward lighter and more portable gadgets. Bucking that idea comes the latest Acer gaming portables, for whom greed is good, even in a world of rapidly expanding gaming handheld waistlines. 

Packing Windows 11, driven by one kilogram (1,050g officially, double the weight of a PlayStation Portal) of silicon horsepower and cooling, the Blaze 11 is the steak-chewing heavyweight cousin you don't want around a party of svelte portables that graze on cucumber and wheatgrass. 

Also from CES:

• Atari GameStation Go packs in the retro controls for CES launch
• Lenovo and Valve waving new handheld gaming devices at CES
• New MSI Claw models scratch at thin air

With a 10.95-inch display (officially) shoehorned into a 36.4 (W) x 17.1 (D) x 1.59 (H) cm chassis, the Blaze 11 is effectively a Windows gaming laptop without the keyboard. 

Powered by AMD Ryzen 8040 processors, coughing up to 39 total AI TOPS, with a mighty 2TB of storage, and 16GB of LPDDR5x memory, that's a lot of power to put pretty pixels and polygons on the wide quad extended graphics array (WQXGA) touchscreen display. 

The Blaze 8 is a more sane approach with an 8.8-inch size screen and 720g weight, but both offer up to 144 Hz refresh rates, driven by Radeon 780M Graphics, with Super Resolution, and FidelityFX Super Resolution gizmos.

The Acer Nitro Blaze 8 will be available in North America in Q2, from $899, and in EMEA in Q2, starting at €999. Or you can go large with the Blaze 11 starting at $1,099 or $1,199.