Acer beTouch E100 deals & review

The Taiwan-based computer maker Acer has made clear it plans to grow its mobile phone business after acquiring E-Ten and has been expanding its line of Android and Windows Mobile smartphones with an eye to competing against compatriot and smartphone industry leader HTC. 

Its line of beTouch and neoTouch smartphones is fast giving HTC some concerns. The Acer beTouch E100 also known as the Acer C1in other market and carries the Windows Mobile 6.5 torch further with upscale features that sometimes can compete with its own other Windows smartphones.

Great Touch Features

The handset comes in the full touchscreen form factor on a slim monolithic body that comes only in black, weighs 118g and measuring a slim 113 x 56 x 12.9mm that accommodates a typical 3.2-inch TFT LCD resistive touchscreen with wide QVGA resolution and 65k colors. 

It is powered by a Qualcomm MSM7225 processor clocked at 528 MHz running a Windows Mobile 6.5 Pro tweaked with the Acer UI 3.0 for a different look and a more useful set of native apps. It comes preloaded with the usual MS Pocket Office and a NetFront browser, email and push email and IM.

This is a 3G phone on the tri band UMTS (850/1900/2100) with HSDPA/HSUPA data connectivity speeds for fast online surfing and downloading. It’s also a quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) with class 10 GPRS/EDGE speeds on the 2G network.

It has no WiFi but you get other local high speed data connectivity options like Bluetooth 2.1 with A2SP for wireless data synching and transfers as well as miniUSB 2.0 for a wired option. SatNav functionality is supported with integrated GPS and A-GPS receivers.

Its imaging is a bit outdated with a 2 megapixel fixed focus camera and a rudimentary QVGA vide recording and noting else. Multimedia gets no better with no FM radio and no 3.5mm headphone for a wired stereo listening option. 

You just get the usual media players for MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC+ audio file format and video files in the MP4/WMV/H.264/H.263 formats.

The Acer beTouch E100 comes with 256MB RAM and 512MB ROM to make the memory hungry OS work on top of a phonebook capacity for nearly unlimited entries, fields, call records and SMS text. There’s also microSD external memory expandability for up to 16 GB. Its 1140 mAh Li-Ion battery gets a mere 5 hours of talk time and 400 hours of standby time on a single full charge.