Two Acer Portable Monitors and a $50 Screen You Can Actually Wear

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The laptop has become the default portable workstation, but it has one limitation that’s hard to overlook: you’re still stuck with one screen. Freelancers, students, and remote workers have learned to manage with a single panel, but demand for more display real estate on the go keeps growing. Cramming a presentation into one corner while notes fill the other half gets old quickly.

Acer is addressing that gap with two new portable monitors announced at Computex 2026, along with a third product aimed at an entirely different audience. The PM161Q JB and PM131QT cover professionals and digital nomads who need an extra screen wherever they land. The Aspire Badge is something else: a wearable display for kids and young creators who want to carry their personality with them, literally.

Designer: Acer

PM161Q JB

The PM161Q JB is the larger of the two portable monitors, coming in at 15.6 inches with a Full HD IPS panel and 170-degree viewing angles. A pair of Type-C ports and an HDMI input handle connectivity, and a single-cable setup means it’s ready to go as soon as you find a seat. A compatible detachable pogo keyboard turns it into a compact workstation without needing anything else nearby.

PM131QT

The PM131QT takes a different approach with a 12.3-inch touchscreen in an ultrawide 1920 × 720 format, a shape that suits secondary-display work rather than standalone use. Five-point touch makes it practical as an interactive panel, and the magnetic mounting design lets it attach to various surfaces, including a car dashboard. It also functions as a dedicated display for AI assistant interfaces on the road.

PM131QT

Both monitors connect over a single Type-C cable and support VESA mounting alongside a standard ¼-inch tripod thread, so a camera tripod becomes a workable monitor stand when there’s no desk in sight. The PM161Q JB starts at $149.99 in North America, arriving in Q4 2026, while the PM131QT comes in at $179.99 in the same window. Both reach Australia in Q3 2026.

The Aspire Badge is a round wearable with a 1.85-inch IPS screen that clips onto a shirt, hangs from a lanyard, or attaches magnetically to a bag. It pairs with a companion app over Bluetooth 6.0 and displays any image or animation pushed from a phone. Battery life runs up to four hours at full brightness or eight at minimum, with contact charging to restore it.

The Badge isn’t purely decorative. It includes an emergency alarm, an SOS alert that flashes in Morse code, and a night flash mode for improved visibility in the dark, adding a safety layer that makes it more than a novelty for kids walking to school or staying out after dark. It supports JPG, GIF, and PNG formats, and comes in at $49.99 in North America.

The three products together cover a broader range of needs than a typical monitor announcement does. The PM161Q JB and PM131QT reflect how seriously portable screen real estate has become for people working away from a fixed desk. The Aspire Badge takes the same logic in a completely different direction, treating a display not as a productivity tool but as something you wear out the door.

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Acer’s Nitro Blaze Link Is a Gaming Handheld That Skips the Processor

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Gaming PCs have fractured into more categories than any single device can cover. The player who needs maximum frame rates for competitive play sits on one end, the person who just wants to game from the couch without moving their rig sits on the other, and every setup in between has its own distinct demands. Most gaming hardware picks a side and leaves the rest unaddressed.

At Computex 2026, Acer addressed nearly the whole range at once with five new products. The lineup runs from the iF Design Award-winning Predator Helios 18 AI at the performance ceiling, through the Nitro 16 and the Nitro Blaze Link streaming handheld, and rounds out with the Predator Aethon 750 TKL keyboard and the Predator Robust Plus Backpack for getting all of it from place to place.

Designer: Acer

The Predator Helios 18 AI is where Acer went all out. Powered by an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor and up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM, it’s configurable with as much as 256GB of DDR5 memory and 6TB of storage spread across three PCIe Gen 5 NVMe slots. For a laptop, that’s a desktop workstation argument.

The 18-inch Mini LED display switches between 4K at 120Hz and Full HD at 240Hz through Acer’s Dual-Mode Display system. It reaches 1,000 nits in HDR mode and delivers Calman Verified color accuracy at 100% DCI-P3 coverage with NVIDIA G-SYNC. For a long competitive session or an extended run through an open-world RPG, the panel is built to match whichever demand comes first.

Keeping those specs from throttling requires hardware to match. Dual 6th Gen Predator AeroBlade 3D Fans each pack 100 metal blades at just 0.05mm, delivering a claimed 20% increase in airflow over plastic fans, supported by liquid metal thermal grease and vector heat pipes. Six speakers with Predator Vox technology handle audio, while Intel Killer DoubleShot Pro combines Wi-Fi 7 and Ethernet to keep online play stable.

The Acer Nitro 16 doesn’t reach the Helios’s ceiling, but it earns its own headline. It’s the first Acer gaming laptop to feature the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D processor, using 2nd Gen AMD 3D V-Cache technology to stay competitive even when unplugged. Paired with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU carrying 12GB of GDDR7 VRAM, it covers most of what serious gaming demands.

The 16-inch WQXGA panel runs at up to 240Hz with a 3ms response time and 100% DCI-P3 coverage, backed by G-SYNC. A dual-fan, quad-intake, quad-exhaust cooling system with vector heat pipes keeps thermals in check. At 2.5kg with a 92 Wh battery, USB 4 connectivity, and Wi-Fi 6E, it’s a more practical travel machine than most competing laptops in its performance class.

The Nitro Blaze Link puts a twist on the gaming handheld design and skips local processing entirely, opting to stream games wirelessly from a connected PC over Wi-Fi 6 via Sunshine and Moonlight services. It pairs naturally with the Helios 18 AI or Nitro 16, letting someone else in the household play from the couch while the main machine stays occupied elsewhere. The 7-inch WUXGA touchscreen and full controller layout handle the experience at a light 464 g.

The Predator Aethon 750 TKL keeps the desk focused with a Tenkeyless layout that removes the number pad and anything non-essential for gaming. Custom Predator magnetic switches support WASD Rapid Trigger, Global Actuation, and Fine Actuation modes, while an 8,000 Hz polling rate and N-key rollover keep every input registering cleanly. Wired, 2.4 GHz wireless, and Bluetooth connections add flexibility for different setups.

The Predator Robust Plus Backpack handles transport, expanding from 25L to 32.5L with a padded compartment for laptops up to 18 inches and a charging cable pass-through for keeping devices topped up on the move. A waterproof inner section and compression compartment round it out. The backpack arrives in North America in Q3 2026 at $199; the Aethon 750 TKL launches in EMEA in Q4 at €149.

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Acer Made Android Tablets in 3:2 Because 16:9 Wasn’t Built for Work

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Android tablets have long defaulted to 16:9 screens, a ratio optimized for video that leaves them awkward for anything resembling actual work. Documents get letterboxed, web pages feel narrow, and the creative canvas ends up shorter than it should be. That works well for watching but not for producing, which is why the 3:2 display, long favored by productivity-first Windows devices, has been largely absent from Android.

Acer is changing that at Computex 2026 with the Iconia Duo lineup, three new Android 16 tablets that debut the brand’s 3:2 aspect ratio across three different price points. Alongside them, two new pairs of smart glasses push the mobile experience off the screen entirely: the AR Vision GR0 for immersive wired display and the GI0 for wireless, hands-free AI assistance on the go.

Designer: Acer

Acer Iconia Duo S14

The flagship of the three is the Iconia Duo S14, built around a 14.2-inch 2.8K OLED display running at 120 Hz with 100% DCI-P3 color coverage. A MediaTek Dimensity 8300 SoC handles the processing, and DisplayPort in and out ports let it feed a larger screen during presentations or act as a portable monitor. At just 6.2 mm thin and 0.73 kg, it doesn’t exactly feel like a compromise.

Acer Iconia Duo S14

The 12.2-inch Iconia Duo S12 carries the same 2.8K OLED panel at 600 nits and adds nano-texture glass with anti-glare and anti-fingerprint properties, housed in an aluminum alloy chassis that makes it noticeably more premium to hold. The Iconia Duo D12 brings the same 3:2 format at a 2400×1600 resolution with a 90Hz refresh rate, starting at $399 for buyers who don’t need OLED.

Acer Iconia Duo S12

All three run Android 16 and support an optional Active Stylus, magnetic kickstand, and detachable keyboard, letting them shift from a drawing canvas to a laptop-like workstation with the right accessories. A microSD card slot in each model accepts cards up to 1 TB for local storage of large creative files, and battery life reaches up to 10 hours across the lineup.

Acer Iconia Duo D12

The AR Vision GR0 takes the display off the tablet entirely. The wired glasses connect to any phone, laptop, or tablet and deliver dual micro OLED FHD screens simulating a 172-inch screen from 6 meters away, with a 50,000:1 contrast ratio. They’re compatible with Android, iOS, and Windows, weigh just 69 g, and include a detachable light shield and a myopia magnetic lens option for prescription wearers.

Acer AR Glasses GR0

The GI0 heads in a different direction. Rather than a display, these 46 g AI glasses integrate a 12 MP camera and Google Gemini for real-time translation, AI captions, and voice-activated queries through three onboard microphones. They connect wirelessly over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi via the Acer AspireSync app, and they’re light enough to wear all day without thinking about them.

Acer AI Glasses GI0

The Iconia Duo S14 starts at $699 in North America in September 2026, the S12 at $549 in August, and the D12 at $399 also in August. The GR0 arrives at $499.99 and the GI0 at $299.99, both heading to EMEA in Q4 2026 and Australia in Q3. Together, they cover a broad stretch of mobile productivity, from an accessible Android tablet to a wearable AI companion.

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