Updating the beTouch Line with the Acer beTouch E400

The Taiwan-based world leader in mobile computing announced at the recently concluded Mobile World Congress the newest and most powerful addition to its beTouch smartphones.

This is the Acer beTouch E400 that abandons the Widows Mobile platform used by its three beTouch predecessors launched last October. It has joined the Android bandwagon with the use of the latest Android 2.1 Éclair though most of its feature set is just a carry over from the beTouch E100 it succeeds.

There's a more powerful 600 MHz Qualcomm QSX 7227 engine under the hood and a few widgets and Acer-specific widgets and features like free music streaming. But other than that, the E400 is just an average mid-range smartphone.

Your Average Smartphone

This is another 3G Android phone on the dual band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA and a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G. Acer plans to have this shipped out starting April with a couple of body color schemes - white with pearl red accents and ceramic white with soft-touch black accents. It has WiFi as well as Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0. You also get SatNav from its GPS receiver with A-GPS, E-compass location finder and Google Maps with Street View, Latitude, Traffic tracking and Point-Of-Interest search.

Its slim body measures 115 x 59.3 x 12 mm and weighs 125 grams and sports an iPhone-like styling without the Chrome surrounds. It has a half-VGA 3.2-inch TFT LCD resistive touchscreen with 256k colors and an accelerometer. Its digital camera gets 3.2-megapixel resolution with autofocus, digital zoom, geo tagging and an unspecified video recording quality.

Multimedia features start with a Roll Tech Nemo Player that supports the popular audio and video file codecs. You get the usual stereo FM receiver, an Acer-sponsored free online music streaming with music Spinlets as well as YouTube video streaming support. There's A2DP support for wireless stereo earphones and a 3.5mm audio jack for regular wired headsets.

Internal storage is capped at the same 256 RAM and 512 MB ROM as in its E100 predecessor with microSD expandability for up to 32 GB. Talk time is up to 5 hours from its modest 1090 mAh Lithium Polymer battery that also delivers 400 hours in standby time when fully charged.

It's a socially aware handset with apps for SNS integration. You get the usual access to the Android Market and pre-bundled apps like a document viewer for PDF and MS Office files with some editing features, Google apps. PC Sync and Google cloud sync, Android browser and email client as well as Gmail and IM using GTalk.

Impressions

While the Acer beTouch E400 is another capable Android smartphone in its class, Acer needs to come out with something more innovative that can fire up the imagination if it really wants to expand its mobile phone business. A look at its current portfolio suggests that it has it sights on the smartphone markets currently dominated by its compatriot HTC.

Like HTC, it's exclusively offering QWERTY sliders and touchscreen smartphones only starting with Windows Mobile when it debut in the business in April last year. The recently concluded Mobile World Congress showcased its latest products that don't seem to square with its ambitious expansion plans. We hope it has other more exciting products up its sleeve in the days ahead.

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