Windows Mobile Gets a Boost with the Acer neoTouch P400

The recent Mobile World Congress saw Acer unveil a handful of Android and Windows smartphones that drew both interest and yawn from its booth visitors. We can understand the yawns especially from the smartphone running a lackluster Windows Mobile 6.5.3 totally overshadowed by a demo of it upcoming successor, the Windows Phone 7 Series.

Continuing the tradition started by its neoTouch Windows handset launched in October last year, we now have the Acer neoTouch P400, a minimized version, not a successor. Slated to ship in Asian and European markets this May, the new neoTouch will be available only in black and is pitched to a younger crowd with a more affordable price tag and a more socially aware feature set.

Features Up Close

Sporting rounded corners where the older neoTouch and the Liquid get sharp corners, the neoTouch P400 achieves a poor shadow of the iPhone profile but without the solid feel and weighing 10g lighter than the iPhone for a more pocket friendly 125 g.

That's not to hint that the neoTouch is anywhere near striking distance of the iPhone. It has the features of an average smartphone that hardly brags any outstanding feature especially with a lackluster Windows Mobile.

That should be clear when looking under the hood. There's no top-of-the-line Snapdragon. Rather, you get a decent Qualcomm 7227 processor clocked at 600 MHz but shares the same 512 MB ROM and 256 MB RAM in the first neoTouch. It gets the same nearly unlimited phonebook entries and fields together with microSD expandability of up to 32 GB. A Lithium Polymer 1090 mAh battery yields up to 5 hours of talk time and 400 hours in standby

The P400 is a quad band GSM radio with Class 10 GPRS/EDGE speeds on 2G. It's also a 3G phone using a dual band UMTS (900/2100) with 3.6 Mbps HSDPA. There's also a tri band (850/900/2100) radio specification presumably for models meant for the North American markets.

Local connectivity is provided by a WiFi 802.11b/g for hotspot internet surfing as well as Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for wireless and wired data transfers, respectively. It has SatNav functionality with a GPS receiver supporting A-GPS.

Screen size gets shrunk from 3.8 in the neoTouch to just 3.2 in the new one with the same TFT LCD resistive touchscreen technology with half-VGA resolution at 64k colors. It comes with the expected gravity accelerometer for auto rotate viewing convenience. Its digital camera also gets minimized from 5 to 3.2 megapixel resolution without LED flash, but you now get image stabilization and the same autofocus and geo tagging from its GPS function.

Mobile entertainment gets a stereo FM radio on top of the Windows Media Player 10 that support MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC+ audio file codecs and MP4/WMV/H.264/H.263 video codecs. You get a 3.5mm AV jack for wired high fidelity headphones and A2DP support for wireless stereo listening.

Software wise, the Acer neoTouch P400 gets preloaded with the apps for integrated and seamless access to social network sites Facebook, Blogger and media sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube. It also gets Spinlets for multimedia music streaming support, Internet Explorer 6, Google's Cloud Sync, Acer Sync and PC sync over WiFi, Google Maps with Latitude, Street View, Traffic and POI search as well as access to the Windows Marketplace.

To get more info on the Acer neoTouch P400 then pay a visit to http://www.moby1.co.uk. They compare the best deals for the neoTouch P400 and lots of other phones. You can also find all the best deals for phones on 3 Mobile.