Welcoming the New Acer neoTouch P400

The Taiwan based computer maker Acer is expanding its neoTouch family with another Windows-based Acer neoTouch P400 unveiled at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. With similarly designed smartphones running Android, Acer is clearly taking the mobile phone business it entered only last year with already half a million units sold since then.

The event highlighted Acer's emerging dual product strategy for Android and Windows with identical handsets for each OS. Its neoTouch line gets Windows Mobile and its beTouch line gets Android.

Common Smartphone Features

A 600 MHz Qualcomm QSX 7227 processor powers the neoTouch P400 and gets the same 256 RAM and 512 MB ROM with almost unlimited phonebook entries of the older Snapdragon neoTouch. There's microSD expansion slot for up to 32 GB. You get up to 5 hours of talk time and 400 hours in standby from a slim 1090 mAh Lithium Polymer battery on a full charge.

It's a 3G phone on the dual band UMTS (900/2100) for the Asian and European markets and comes with 3.6 Mbps HSDPA for high speed internet surfing, social networking and media file sharing online. A tri band (850/900/2100) model is also available for the North American markets.

It's also a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE class 10 on 2G. Local high speed data connectivity gets WiFi 802.11b/g for hotspot internet access while its Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 allows wireless and wired data transfers, respectively.

The P400 is housed in a slim 115 x 59.3 x 12 mm touchscreen monolithic body weighing 125g and accommodates a conventional 3.2-inch TFT resistive touchscreen with half-VGA resolution and 64k colors with the usual accelerometer for auto rotate viewing convenience.

Imaging gets an outdated 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with digital zoom. You get SatNav with a built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support as well as digital compass location finder that can geo-tag your photos shots. Video recording is probably sub-par as we didn't get much detail at the MWC event.

Multimedia tasking gets a Windows Media Player 10 for common media file codecs, a stereo FM receiver, YouTube video streaming and music streaming with music Spinlets. Stereo listening offers a choice of either wired regular Hi-Fi headsets from a 3.5mm AV jack or going wireless with its A2DP support.

It's a socially aware smartphone with apps for social networking integration as well as access to the Windows Marketplace. It gets a native Microsoft Exchange Server to access corporate email. It comes preloaded with document viewers for PDF and MS Office files.

Google apps like Google Search and Google Maps with Street View, Latitude and Traffic to help its SatNav features, there's Cloud Sync from Google, Acer Sync and PC Sync with other computing devices over WiFi, Internet Explorer 6 and email client, GTalk for IM and Gmail support.

Availability

As announced at the MWC, the Acer neoTouch P400 is expected to ship in May. No word on any pricing at this time but as a midrange smartphone, we can look at the first Windows neoTouch with an online SIM free price of around €550 as the ceiling price and we expect the new P400 to fetch a much lower price than that.

To get more info on the Acer neoTouch P400 and other new releases then click here. They compare contracts for the Acer neoTouch P400 and many other phones. You can also find all the best deals for phones on 3 Mobile.