Aug

Acer Goes Android With The Acer Betouch E400

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Acer Goes Android With The Acer Betouch E400

The beTouch family of smartphones from Acer gets its latest and most powerful member with the unveiling of the Acer beTouch E400 at the recent 2010 Mobile World Congress just ended.

It abandons the Windows Mobile OS that its older siblings use and now runs on the latest Android 2.1 Éclair, making it more competitive with other smartphones in the market than its E100 predecessor ever was. It is expected to ship in April in two color schemes – white with pearl red accents and ceramic white with soft-touch black. No pricing information is available at this time.

Together with a bevy of new smartphones, the Taiwan-based computer giant Acer puts into high gear its plans to expand its mobile phone business starting this year, after selling half a million units in its debut last April with a target of selling 3 million this year and thrice that in 2011.

For a newcomer, that’s quite ambitious though it has years of expertise as the world’s leading maker and supplier of desktop and laptop computers. It won’t raise many eyebrows if not for its bland and uninteresting portfolio of smartphones released at the MWC, but perhaps it has plans of releasing other more innovative smartphones.

As it is, apart from a more capable OS and some Acer-specific features like free music streaming and some widgets, there’s no innovative feature on it to inspire confidence in its expansion plans. Even its more powerful brother Liquid e is less stellar with just an upgraded OS on the same Liquid A1 body and electronics.

Feature Highlights

The E400 gets a 600 MHz Qualcomm QSX 7227 processor to run the latest Android 2.1 Éclair, making it the best smartphone in the beTouch stable. Everything else about is average. But let there be no mistake, it’s as competent as any smartphone in its class.

It’s a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE radio on 2G and a dual band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA on 3G. There’s WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for high speed local data transfers. There’s a GPS receiver with A-GPS, E-compass location finder and Google Maps with Latitude, Traffic, Street View and POI search.

Its iPhone-like styled body measures 115 x 59.3 x 12 mm, weighs just 125 grams and gets a 3.2-inch TFT half-VGA resistive touchscreen with 256k color depth. A gravity accelerometer is there for auto rotate viewing convenience.

Imaging is supported be an average 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with digital zoom and geo tagging. Video recording is claimed to be sharp but Acer hasn’t disclosed any detail. It gets multimedia from a Roll Tech Nemo Player that plays the popular audio and video file codecs.

There’s stereo FM receiver as well as free online music streaming with Acer Spinlets and YouTube video streaming. You get stereo headphone listening options with either is A2DP support or 3.5mm audio jack.

Internal storage is from a 256 RAM and 512 MB ROM with microSD expandability for up to 32 GB. Its modest 100 mAh Li-Po battery when fully charges gets you up to up 5 hours of talk time of up to 400 hours of standby time.

The Acer beTouch E400 is a social aware handset with apps social networking integration. It comes pre-bundled with Gmail and GTalk for IM, a document viewer for PDF and MS Office files with some editing liberties, PC Sync and Google cloud sync, Google Search, Android email client and web browser and access to the Android market.