When it first launched, many (including myself) decried the PlayStation Portal as something that didn’t make sense. After all, it could not stand alone, and was completely reliant on an existing PS5 to work. Then it became a sleeper hit, due to the simple argument of letting gamers game while someone else was watching TV. And now that Acer has revealed the Nitro Blaze Link, I can’t help but think that there’s a chance of history repeating itself.
But this is not the article to read if you’re looking into that crystal ball. At best, what I can do is tell you what it feels like to have the Acer Nitro Blaze Link in your hands, and playing games with it. The caveat being that, as is usually the case with public reveals like this, it’s being showcased in a pretty public space, and therefore a far from ideal experience.
As I mentioned in an earlier report, while Acer may call the Nitro Blaze Link a “streaming-first” handheld, the reality is more “streaming-only”. A look at the spec sheet will tell you as much, with its Realtek RTD1619BPB chipset, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of eMMC storage. And if you didn’t have access to the spec sheet, you’d suspect that to be the case when you pick it up.
On one hand, the Acer Nitro Blaze Link doesn’t exactly feel cheap. But on the other, especially if you’re used to other handhelds, be it PCs or console hybrids like the Nintendo Switch, the Blaze Link may as well be as light as a feather. This may be an indication to another potential problem, which is the 18 Wh battery, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Triggers Are Switches
Weight aside, it does feel pretty good in hand. There’s some degree of ergonomics in the design, such as the bulging grips on both sides. Asymmetry aside, the analogue sticks do feel nice to use, albeit with very little resistance. The d-pad sounds like the average four-way implementation, but the rounded shape of the d-pad itself allows for diagonals to register pretty easily. There wasn’t a fighting game like Street Fighter 6 or Tekken 8 to granularly test this out, unfortunately.
The other buttons also feel like very stiff but otherwise average membrane keyboard buttons. With the exception of the triggers, which have a very mechanical click to their actuation. And that’s one of the potential issues with the Acer Nitro Blaze Link. In an age where most games could make use of analogue trigger inputs, limiting it to a switch feels a bit restrictive. This is especially noticeable when the game on demo is Forza Horizon 6 streaming from a nearby laptop.
The next issue is with the aforementioned sticks. Despite magnetic tech being far from niche tech these days, the ones on the Acer Nitro Blaze Link still make use of the old potentiometer. This means noticeable wear and tear within a couple of years, or even months if you’re unlucky. One can argue that this was done to keep costs down, but we’ll have to see at what price it actually retails at to decide if it was worth the sacrifice.
Airwave Congestion Is Real
One of the two biggest question marks on the Acer Nitro Blaze Link spec sheet though is its battery life. On one hand, it’s not doing any local processing, so it shouldn’t be consuming too much energy. But 18 Wh does sound minuscule compared to, say, what the Predator Atlas 8 has, which goes up to 80 Wh. It may be fine if, like the PS Portal, it’s mainly used as a winding down device. But having to recharge it every night or the morning after will get old fast.
The other one is latency. For now, it’s unclear if the Acer Nitro Blaze Link has to be connected to the same wireless network as the host PC, or if it can stream across the web the way the PS Portal now can. But for now, within the show floor and the handheld being only a couple metres away from the host laptop, the latency is pretty noticeable. Your inputs only register half a second after on average, which makes it not ideal for anything that requires real-time input. Granted, as mentioned earlier, there’s no denying that airwave congestion within a show floor contributes to the issue, but it remains something worth mentioning.
A PS Portal-Like Trajectory? Who Knows?
As I mentioned at the start, the Acer Nitro Blaze Link has the potential to do what the PS Portal did – sell well despite being a streaming-only thing. But while the former has the benefit of freeing up a living room TV, I imagine needing to game while the primary gaming rig is in use is a much more niche scenario, assuming it is powerful enough to process what both users need. At any rate, it’s still up in the air what the Blaze Link will cost, and if you can even buy it, so we should leave it at that until later announcements change this.
