MSI appears to have just revealed a brand new handheld, with the Claw 7 A2HM name appearing on the MSI website, potentially by accident. At the same time, it also just officially revealed a brand new white and black Claw 8 AI+, called the Polar Tempest, which comes with double the storage of the base model.
While MSI fell well short of expectations with its initial handhelds, it hopes to find a spot amongst the best gaming handheld with its future products. Set to be included in this lineup is a new 8AI+ in white with 2TB of SSD storage, and potentially a new Claw 7 handheld, which appears to drops the AI+ naming convention entirely.
First up is the new MSI Claw 8AI+ Polar Tempest edition. This is a striking white version of the established Claw 8AI+, but it also comes with double the base storage, meaning you now get 2TB. This model is expected to be released later this month and cost $999.
On the leaked new model, reference to a Claw 7 A2HM was made on a store page for a replacement rear cover on the official MSI spare parts website in Europe. This is still listed on the site at the time of writing, as seen in the image below.
Most notable is the absence of the AI+ naming convention, which leads to speculation that this new model could drop the current Intel SoC for an AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme, which doesn’t have any active NPU (Neural Processing Units).
Of course, it’s more likely that MSI is moving to the Intel Core Ultra 200H for this model, which lacks a powerful NPU. This can be seen when looking deeper into the naming strategy that MSI uses. The Intel Core Ultra 200V is used in the MSI 8 and 7 AI+, which has the model name A2VM. Given that this leaked handheld has the name A2HM, swapping V for H indicates it could be the aforementioned switch from Core Ultra 200V to 200H.
Only time will tell when it comes to the details of this handheld, but it’s possible that MSI is planning a reveal for Computex, with a release date to come before the end of 2025.
The MSI handhelds use Windows, which is often the weakness of handhelds that it features on, but the AOKZOE A1X has shown that Windows can be a good handheld OS, in the right circumstances.
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