The Acer beTouch E400 Takes the Top of the beTouch Family

The Taiwan-based computer maker Acer plans to expand its mobile phone business after selling about half a million units in its debut year in 2009. The recently concluded 2010 Mobile World Congress saw its plans clearly laid out with the release of a few smartphones it schedules to ship out starting April.

One of them is the Acer beTouch E400, the most powerful smartphone in the beTouch family Acer launched in October. Abandoning the Windows Mobile OS that encumbered with first E100 beTouch smartphone, the new members now run on the Android OS with the E400 running the latest Android 2.1 Éclair on a more powerful 600 MHz Qualcomm QSD7227 processor.

Average Feature Set

The E400 is coming out with a choice of two body color motifs - white with pearl red accents and ceramic white with soft-touch black accents. There are a few Acer-inspired home screen widgets and services like free music streaming but other than that, the E400 gets average features but comes across as a capable Android smartphone like any other.

• It's a 3G phone on a dual band UMTS with a relatively slower 3.6 Mbps HSDPA and 384 Kbps HSUPA but still adequate for fast internet surfing. It's also a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G with WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for local data transfers. It has SatNav features using a built-in GPS receiver with E-compass location finder and Google Maps with Latitude, Street View, Traffic monitoring and POI search.

• Its display is typical for its body size with a 3.2-inch TFT half-VGA resistive touchscreen and 256k colors. There's the usual accelerometer for auto rotate viewing convenience. Imaging comes with an average 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with digital zoom, geo tagging and video recording.

• Multimedia gets a Roll Tech Nemo Playback for popular media file formats, a stereo FM receiver, Acer-promoted free online music streaming with its home screen music Spinlets as well as YouTube video streaming. There's wireless stereo listening with A2DP and wire headphone from its 3.5mm audio jack.

• You get 256 RAM and 512 MB ROM phone memory and microSD expandability for up to 32 GB. Talk time is up to 5 hours and a standby time up to 400 hours from a 1090 mAh Lithium Polymer battery on a single charge.

• You get social networking integration, access to the Android Market and pre-bundled apps that include a document viewer for PDF and MS Office files, Google apps, PC Sync, Android email client and web browser as well as Gmail and IM through GTalk.

Impressions

Having sold about half a million smartphones last year, Acer now plans to sell 3 million and then triple that next year. It may be too early in the day to predict how far Acer's ambitious plans get squared with some lackluster new smartphones in unveiled at the MWC. The Acer beTouch E400 is just average from the feature list above. Even its flagship Liquid e is just a rehashed old Liquid with nothing more than an updated Android OS. Acer will have to be more innovative and exciting than that if it wants to expand its business. We bid Acer good luck.

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