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I'm at Computex this week trying all sorts of new gaming hardware, and one of the first to grab the headlines has been Acer's reimagined handheld PC, the Predator Atlas 8. People are right to be excited about this new best gaming handheld contender. Not only does it pack in some really powerful Intel innards inside it that stand apart from the standard AMD chips used in portable PCs, but it's yet another option in a blossoming handheld market.
I've had the chance to go hands-on with it though, and as the resident PC controller expert here at GamesRadar+, I was taken by it for totally different reasons than its impressive specs. For me, when it comes to handheld gaming, comfort is king. If you can translate the experience of actually holding a comfortable gamepad in your hand to an on-the-go device, it's going to unlock a whole new level of enjoyment and usability.
I love me some handheld gaming, but if I'm totally honest, I'm not all that interested in trying to cram expensive gaming PC performance into a portable footprint. I think, as we've seen, it just drives the cost of entry for what should be a really accessible type of device into realms where hardly anyone can afford them as a secondary (or even primary) way to play games.
Not to mention, the types of games I tend to want to take with me on the go aren't the performance-heavy singleplayer games or the competitive multiplayer ones. Both of those are examples of games I want to enjoy at home with my proper setup. For me, it's the indie games, the narrative adventures, the open worlds that I want to keep coming back to from the yesteryear of my Steam library, but if a handheld isn't comfortable, I'm not going to want to play when I'm out and about.
That's something that Acer has absolutely nailed with its new handheld. I remember testing the first iteration of its handheld gaming PC when it was first revealed at IFA a couple of years ago, and although it had some cool design points, it was launching before the era of the larger, more comfortable MSI Claws, and well before the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X paved the way for more pronounced grips on handheld devices.
There's been a serious evolution with the Atlas 8 in terms of ergonomics. Acer isn't exactly known for its controllers, but you wouldn't know that from holding the Atlas 8 in your hands. Acer has managed to translate a lot of great design philosophies from a pro controller to a handheld form factor. It's not afraid to be bulky, putting some girth into the display/mid-section of the console courtesy of its Predator AeroBlade dual-fan cooling system. But that also translates to the grips, which have an equivalent amount of heft.
This has knock-on effects all over the place. Asymmetrical thumbsticks don't feel like such a stretch anymore because your hands wrap around and down, as opposed to stretching and straining around the flat back of a device in order to bear its weight. The back buttons are suddenly easier to press regularly because, again, that middle finger isn't so tied up with making sure you don't drop your pricey portable.
Even from a design and aesthetics standpoint, the Atlas 8 somehow looks more natural than the Xbox Ally, which arguably does look like someone's ungracefully stuck two cylindrical grips to an existing device.
In my experience of going hands-on with both the Atlas 8 and the revitalised 20th anniversary edition of the Xbox ROG Ally X at Computex, my thought is that it's actually okay for a handheld PC to be heavy, because as long as you can grip it properly, your hands aren't going to fatigue as easily, or even notice the extra weight because of how things are balanced. I say that as an owner of the original ROG Ally X, which certainly has some weight to it, but doesn't have the ergonomics to back it up.
On the Acer side of things, the Atlas 8 even has trigger stop switches, which change its triggers from standard analog Hall Effect depression into a microswitch instant click. These can be huge for giving you improved feel across different genres of games, and to my knowledge, this is the first handheld gaming PC to add this feature. It's all about comfort with the design of the Acer Predator Atlas 8, and I applaud Acer for pushing the envelope in this regard because it's certainly going to give the Xbox ROG Ally X a run for its money, and beyond its Xbox branding, I think the reason that device is proving so popular is that it puts comfort front and centre.
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