First neoTouch QWERTY Slider – the Acer neoTouch P300

After just over a year in the mobile phone business, the leading Taiwan-based computer maker Acer embarks on an ambitious business expansion that it hopes will sell 3 million handsets for 2010, up from the half million handsets it sold in its first year and then go on to 2011 with thrice that much.

It has made that plan clear and leading the way are some new beTouch and neoTouch smartphones unveiled at the recently concluded Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One of them is the Acer neoTouch P300 which gets the first tactile full QWERTY slider among the neoTouch family of Windows Mobile smartphones.

We can't say that Acer has the best products in the event but they're not entirely that bad either. You have the new Liquid e which is nothing more than the same Liquid updated with a new Android OS. Then there are its beTouch Androids that deliberately run the older Android OS with some of the most average features that are sure to command budget prices when they reach the market.

The same goes for their neoTouch smartphones. One of them is the Acer neoTouch P300 that sports a full QWERTY slider form factor that is quite common among Windows Mobile smartphones. But this takes the limelight as being the first neoTouch to have one. Other than that, it's downhill all the way.

It's bad enough they run on Windows Mobile but with the new Windows Phone 7 Series demoed at the same MWC, there really can't too much excitement not just on them but on any Windows Mobile smartphone at this time, especially when you know how superb the new WinPho7 is and there's just no upgrade path to it from an OS that should have been like it in the first place.

Average Smartphone Features

As a competent smartphone, sure, there's no doubt the neoTouch P300 is one. But its OS aside, there's really little to get excited about its hardware specs which is typical for a well-spec'd handset.
It's a 3G phone on a single band UMTS with an average 7.2Mbps HSDPA connectivity as well as a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G. It has WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0. It also has SatNav from its built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support.

It gets an average 3.2-inch TFT LCD resistive touchscreen display with accelerometer for auto rate, an autofocus digicam with 3.2 megapixel resolution and geo tagging from its GPS and unspecified video recording. Multimedia gets a competent Windows Medial Player for reproducing the popular audio and video file codecs but no FM stereo radio.

Software-wise, the Acer neoTouch P300 can get a lot more interesting though. Its underwhelming Windows Mobile 6.5.3 Pro gets native support for IM with Windows Live and Microsoft Exchange Server so you can access your corporate email. There's also Internet Explorer 6 Mobile with Flash.

It's also socially imbued with SNS apps that integrate your phonebook contacts with Facebook, Flickr and Blogger accounts. It also comes with a built-in YouTube application for video streaming. It also get preloaded with SatNav aids like Satellite Data Update, Google Maps, Street View, Latitude, Traffic tracking and POI Search and provides access to the Windows Marketplace.

To get more info on the Acer neoTouch P300 and other new releases then click here. They compare contracts for the Acer neoTouch P300 and many other phones. You can also find all the best deals for phones on 3 Mobile.