The Morning After: Acer's huge 11-inch handheld gaming PC

Handheld gaming PCs are here to stay, and as the entire category grows and matures, things are getting bigger. Even bigger. Packing detachable controllers and a built-in kickstand, Acer’s Blaze 11 shares several similarities with Lenovo’s Legion Go handheld.

However, (the clue is in the name) the Blaze 11 has a huge 11-inch 2,560 x 1,600 IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of brightness. The effect of that huge screen is akin to “holding a steering wheel with a tablet-sized screen slammed in the middle,” according to our own Sam Rutherford. It’ll be powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS chip and Radeon 780M graphics, 16GB of RAM and up to 2TB of SSD storage.

It makes the Steam Deck look like a GameBoy Micro.

— Mat Smith

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Alienware’s Area-51 desktop PC is back, baby!

Aww, it’s just as expensive as I remember!

As predicted, CES threw up a lot of PC upgrades and accompanying laptops. Alienware, however, is bringing back an old favorite: its Area-51 desktops. The new Area-51 PC has a full-sized 80L tower with headroom for over 600W of dedicated graphics power and 280W for processing. It supports the latest NVIDIA graphics cards and an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K CPU. In fact, its launch configuration will cost around $4,500. (Other builds will follow, including a (unspecified) cheaper entry-level option.)

The company says a new airflow system moves 25 percent more air, runs 13 percent cooler and is 45 percent quieter than the two previous Alienware Aurora desktops. That cooling effect, the company says, leads to 50 percent more processing power.

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The Last of Us season 2 arrives in April, and a Horizon Zero Dawn film is in the works

And! A Ghost of Tsushima anime is also in development.

Sony’s CES presentation yesterday was heavy on entertainment announcements — especially concerning its PlayStation hits. Columbia Pictures is in the early stages of developing a movie based on the post-apocalyptic PlayStation game Horizon Zero Dawn, while Neil Druckmann from Naughty Dog popped out to announce season two of The Last of Us would hit HBO in April. You can also expect an anime based on Ghost of Tsushima Legends, the coop multiplayer game linked to the original. Something to keep wannabe ninjas and samurai entertained till the sequel lands?

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Sony’s first EV is open for reservations at CES 2025

Two versions of the car will be available starting at $89,900.

Through Sony Honda Mobility, you can reserve a vehicle now for $200. The car that was once the Vision-S and Vision-S 02 will actually be a thing you can buy. Now known as Afeela 1, the EV has continued to evolve in the past few years, adding an in-vehicle assistant and updated interior design. More on that later this week!

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I hate winter; here’s a solar beach umbrella

Anker’s parasol doesn’t have a price yet.

The Anker Solix Solar Beach Umbrella also appeared at CES 2025, a flexible, freestanding umbrella that can also charge your phone or power the company’s EverFrost 2 cooler — convenient. Like a normal umbrella, the Solix Solar Beach Umbrella is portable and collapsible, but Anker says it’s using perovskite solar cells in its panels to offer “30 percent better performance” than traditional crystalline silicon cells, which translates to a solar-rated power of up to 80W.

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