And when the PC companies see what they think of as a new market opportunity, the race for differentiation begins, with occasionally silly results.
Enter the Acer Nitro Blaze 11, which looks like a mostly conventional handheld with Nintendo Switch-style detachable controllers but with a huge 11-inch screen (the OLED Steam Deck is 7.4 inches, and other Deck-alikes mostly land between seven and nine inches). At 2.3 pounds, the Blaze 11 pushes the boundaries of what can reasonably be considered “handheld.” It also has a Switch-style kickstand for propping it up on a desk or table, which feels like an admission that you might not want to be holding the thing all the time.
All of that said, “take a thing people already like and make it bigger/smaller” has been a fairly reliable path to success in PCs, phones, and other tech over the last couple of decades. Maybe an 11-inch “handheld” won’t seem so weird a few years from now.
A “keyboard for writers”
The Wordrunner is “the first mechanical keyboard for writers,” or at least it will be if its Kickstarter takes off.
Credit:
Freewrite
This one’s for all the writers out there who believe that they’re just one equipment purchase away from having a perfect, productive, distraction-free writing setup.
Freewrite is known primarily for its smart typewriters, keyboards that are attached to small monochrome LCD or E-Ink displays that promise to be “dedicated drafting tools” that “maximize your productivity.
This year, they’ve unveiled a PC keyboard billed as “the first mechanical keyboard designed for writers.” The Wordrunner has a function row of shortcut keys that will be useful to writers navigating their way through a document, plus a built-in timer and word counter for the times when you just need to pull words out of your brain and you can go back and edit them into cohesive thoughts later.
I do enjoy a keyboard with extraneous knobs and doodads, which makes the mechanical “wordometer” particularly appealing to me. Unfortunately, as of this writing the Wordrunner is still in a primordial, pre-Kickstarter state of development. If you’re interested, you can put down $1 now, so you can get early bird Kickstarter pricing in February, and you might get a keyboard at some point several months or years in the future. Freewrite is, at least, an established company with several products under its belt, so we wouldn’t be too worried about this project vanishing without a trace as so many Kickstarter efforts do.
