Article by David Rasnake
Video by PhoneArena.com

We preview Acer's DX900, X960, F900 and M900 devices, the Taiwanese manufacturer's first step into the smartphone space

Published on Mar 11, 2009

Acer’s entry into the smartphone sector is going to start with a huge burst of activity in 2009. It plans to release a multitude of smartphone handsets breaking into double figures. However, the Taiwanese manufacturer is starting off with four mid to high-range handsets from the new Tempo range, each designed for a slightly different audience.

(Video by PhoneArena.com)

 

We had a hands-on session with each of the devices to see exactly who they’re aimed at, and whether the intended audience should be interested in getting their hands on them.

Although we don’t have definitive pricing information on the models as yet, they all fall within a €299-450 price bracket. They’re currently all running a modified version of Windows Mobile 6.1, but there are plans for subsequent editions of these models to use Windows 6.5 Mobile, from the second half of the 2009.

Those who have used Windows Mobile before will be familiar with its relatively dense menu systems, but Acer has tried to mitigate for this with a very visual pair of shortcut-based home screens (see fig 1). They’re designed to look like a home office- that’s the room complete with a calendar and filofax rather than anything to do with Microsoft's interface.

The screens give you direct access to your SMS messages, the two main phone menus, your photos, music and calendar through some reasonably intuitive icons. Designed for accessibility, it all looks a little amateurish, and we can imagine more experienced Windows Mobile users longing to get back to a more sober front end. If you’re new to smartphones though, these home screens do help bridge the gap between a bog-standard mobile phone interface and Windows Mobile.

All four phones come with Windows Media Player installed, plus some core Microsoft office applications, including Word, Powerpoint and Excel.

M900 and F900

In basic navigation terms, these four handsets fall into two groups. The larger-screened M900 and F900 phones feature 3.8-inch WVGA displays, and are operated more-or-less solely using the touchscreen. The X960 and DX900, on the other hand each have navigation pads beneath their 2.8-inch touchscreens, along with a pair of softkeys.

However, the M900, roundly described as a business communicator device, features a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out with a reassuringly smooth motion. Once the keyboard is revealed, the M900 automatically switches to landscape mode. The transition between the different screen orientations was less than perfect, a little slow and glitchy, but we were assured that the interface was still being worked on and tweaked at that point.

Considering the full keyboard and the additional fingerprint reader on the M900’s front, it’s reasonable to assume it’s going to be the most expensive of the four. By contrast, the F900 feels like a streamlined or cut-down version of the design. The camera is less powerful, with three megapixels against the M900’s five, and there’s no QWERTY keyboard. It does shed 5mm thickness in the process, but it also feels less solid. The F900 feels slightly plasticky by comparison.

Thanks to its feature-set, the F900 is more likely to suffer under comparisons to the iPhone, and in a direct face-off, the F900 doesn’t come off too well in this respect. It can’t even claim a weight benefit since it weighs more than the iPhone.

When compared to other touchscreen smartphones, Acer's attempts don't come out on top. For one, the touchscreens don’t respond particularly well to thumb or finger control. In fact, all four devices previewed here have styluses that slot into their bodies, and navigating through menus becomes far easier when using them.

Even with this added precision though, scrolling tended to be intermittently sluggish. Again, Acer were still in the process of optimisation at the time so this may improve by the time we get to review the phones.

The X960 and DX900

As with other large touchscreen devices, the X960 and DX900 can be roughly categorised as a catch-all device matched with a higher-end spec aimed at perhaps a more niche market. The DX900 waves its flag with dual SIM functionality, allowing both HSDPA and EDGE SIMs to be used simultaneously.

Interestingly, the DX900 also ditches the visual home screens, using a more pragmatic approach that suggests it has users who already have some smartphone experience in mind. We expect the phone may come with the widget option at launch though. With a similar but slimmer design, the X960 is the more general-purpose oriented of the two, and it brings back the widget-based desktop home screens.

Neither of the handsets has a particularly strong camera, offering three megapixels and a standard LED flash each. If Acer is trying to bring smartphones to a wider phone-buying audience, they may have to up their game on this front. We expect that their upcoming Q3 and Q4 2009 devices may do just that, although what price bracket they may fall into is another question.

Another odd standout feature of the DX900 is the 3.5mm headphone jack. It’s the only phone of the four to feature one, the others having proprietary audio outputs. Considering it’s something that would be appreciated by a lower-end buyer, perhaps looking to listen to music on a commute without having to use a separate socket converter, its sole inclusion on the arguably business-oriented DX900 seems odd.

All four of these phones have, to an extent, similar internals. They all use the same CPU, modem and OS- apart from the DX900, which uses slight variants of the first two. Each phone is essentially a hardware iteration of an archetypal smartphone, each lopping-off or adding on features presumably to try and pose as the ideal solution for a sector of the market-emerging or established.

With a handful of additional devices still due out in the coming months, we can expect these to fill out the remaining gaps. This’ll mean more devices at the extreme ends of the price scale. The upcoming C1, a full touchscreen phone to be priced under £50 should fulfill the lower end of the spectrum. With the Early Learning-style tagline ‘my first mobile internet phone’, it should in theory be able to pull-in more new smartphone users than the four phones we’ve looked at today.