The Taiwan based computer giant Acer unveils its latest line of Android beTouch and Windows Mobile neoTouch smartphones at the recent Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain.
Only a year old in the mobile phone business, Acer claims to have sold roughly 500,000 handsets in its debut year and plans to do 3 million this year. While we can't put its ambitious plans squarely with the lackluster breed of smartphones it unveiled at the MWC, we can only hope these now phones are just a start and a stab at a wider market with smartphones that feature water-down specs on both its Android and Windows Mobile products.
Among its Windows offerings, the new Acer neoTouch P300 gets the limelight as the first in the expanding neoTouch family of Widows Mobile smartphones to sport a tactile full QWERTY slider form factor together with its touchscreen display.
Features Up Close
With an elegantly sculpted QWERTY slider body measuring 110 x 55 x 15.1 mm and weighing a hefty 130g, the neoTouch P300 gets to accommodate a 3.2-inch TFT LCD resistive touchscreen with Wide QVGA resolution the 65k colors common among Windows Mobile smartphones. There's a gravity accelerometer for auto rotate viewing convenience according to handset tilt.
A 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 engine with 256 MB RAM and 512 ROM runs the Widows Mobile 6.5.3 Pro and supported with microSD memory expandability. It's 3G phone on the single bad UMTS with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA connectivity for high speed internet access. It's also a quad band GSM for unrestricted international roaming with class 10 GPRS/EDGE data connectivity on the 2G network.
Local wireless and wired data transfers get Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and microUSB 2.0, respectively. You also get a built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support for SatNav functionality. Its 970 mAh Li-Po battery when fully charged can deliver no more than 4 hours of talk time and 400 hours in standby.
Its digicam gets 3.2 megapixel of resolution with autofocus and geo tagging. Video recording remains a mystery as of this writing. Multimedia is supported by its Windows Media Player for playback of popular media file formats, but you get no FM stereo receiver. Its 3.5mm audio jacks allows standard wired stereo listening while its A2DP support allows lets you listen wirelessly.
It's a socially aware smartphone with SNS apps for integration with Facebook and comes preloaded with a rich set of apps that include messaging apps like Outlook, Hotmail and Webmail client, the Internet Explorer 6 with Flash for browsing and Windows Live Messenger.
It also gets a document viewer for PDF ad MS Office files, Active Sync, Cloud Sync and Acer Sync as well as SatNav aids like Satellite Data Update. Google Maps, Street View, Latitude, Traffic tracking and POI Search. You get access to the Windows Marketplace as well as music streaming via Acer Spinlets, video streaming via YouTube client.
Availability
As announced at the MWC, the Acer neoTouch P300 is expected to hit Europe and the rest of the world starting this April and will come only in black. There is still no price information but with an average feature set common with other Windows smartphones, we don't expect this to go over the €200 SIM-free price point before taxes and subsidies.