Acer’s new handheld lets you stream big PC games to your couch

Acer’s announced a new gaming handheld that might help you avoid paying an arm and a leg for a newly price-hiked Steam Deck — if you’ve already got a non-handheld gaming PC, anyway. The new Acer Nitro Blaze Link is a “streaming-first” device with a form factor similar to other modern gaming handhelds, but made to work with a PC to stream gameplay locally over Wi-Fi.

The one-pound Nitro Blaze Link comes with a 7″, 1,200p touchscreen and Wi-Fi 6. Acer says the new handheld is for “for gamers who demand performance and value,” though we don’t yet know how much it’ll cost.

Streaming gameplay locally from a powerful primary device to a more lightweight handheld is hardly a new idea. As described, the Nitro Blaze Link sounds a lot like Sony’s PlayStation Portal that similarly streams gameplay from a local PlayStation 5 over Wi-Fi. Like that device, the Blaze Link seems like it won’t do much else on its own: according to CNET, the handheld runs a version of Linux and comes with only a single gigabyte of RAM, so it’s hard to imagine running any games on the device itself.

We don’t know exactly when the Nitro Blaze Link will be available; Acer is aiming to release it sometime in the fourth quarter of the year. Its price hasn’t been announced yet, either, but given it’s a relatively low-power device without much memory, ideally it’ll be spared the worst of the tech inflation we’ve been seeing lately.