A look at the Acer Line of mobile products since it came out with its first smartphone last April, it seems that one of the world’s leading mobile computer makers is headed for a showdown with compatriot HTC, the world’s largest smartphone maker outside of the Symbian OS.
The recent Mobile World Congress showcased the latest smartphones that included the Acer beTouch E400, the fifth and most powerful in the beTouch family Acer launched in October. It’s also the first beTouch smartphone, together with the inferior E110, to abandon the underwhelming Windows Mobile OS to run the new Android 2.1 Éclair with the E10 running the older 1.5 Cupcake.
Features at a Glance
The 600 MHz Qualcomm QSX 7227 processor powers the E400 making it the most powerful smartphone in the beTouch family. Its internal memory is 256 RAM and 512 MB ROM with practically unlimited phonebook entries. There’s the usual external memory expandability for up to 32 GB with its microSD slot. It’s a 3G phone on the dual band UMTS (900/2100) with 3.6 Mbps HSDPA and 384 Kbps HSUPA for the European and Asian markets.
The North American markets can expect a tri band (850/900/2100) model. It’s also a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE class 10 on 2G. Local connectivity support gets WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0.
It sports the same elegant simple lines of its touchscreen E100 predecessor but weighing 7 grams heavier at 125 grams. It measures 115 x 59.3 x 12 mm which is large enough to take in a 3.2-inch TFT half-VGA resistive touchscreen with 256k colors and the usual gravity accelerometer. Imaging gets an average 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with digital zoom and geo tagging courtesy of its SatNav functionality using A-GPS support as well as e-compass location finder.
Acer is silent about its video recording features. Multimedia gets a Roll Tech Nemo Player for common media file codecs, a stereo FM receiver, free music streaming with music Spinlets, YouTube video streaming, and stereo listening via A2DP or a 3.5mm AV jack. You get 5 hours of talk time and 400 hours in standby from a 1090 mAh Lithium Polymer battery.
It has social networking integration and access to the Android Market. Its other pre-bundled apps include a document viewer for PDF and MS Office files, Google Search and Google Maps with Traffic, Latitude and Street View used with its SatNav features, PC Sync and Google cloud sync, an Android web browser and the usual email client, Gmail and GTalk for IM support.
Availability
The start of the 2nd quarter will see the Acer beTouch E400 appearing in Europe and elsewhere with a choice of three body colors, ceramic white with soft-touch black accents and white with pearl red accents and comes with interchangeable battery covers in the alternate color. The US markets should get it at about the same with the right UMTS frequency bands. No price information a this time but if the midrange beTouch E100 predecessor’s SIM-free price of around €340 is any indication, we can expect the E400 to command about the same price.
Tags: 256k colors, a2dp, connectivity support, E110, edge class, fm receiver, gps support, hsupa, location finder, mb rom, mobile os, phonebook entries, resistive touchscreen, satnav, stereo fm