Acer beTouch E400 Android smartphone [printer-friendly] • reghardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.com/2010/07/23/review_smartphone_android_acer_betouch_e400/

Acer beTouch E400 Android smartphone

HTC beater?

23rd July 2010 07:02 GMT

Review Acer is fully committed to producing smartphones, but seems to be slightly schizophrenic in its approach. There are devices in the Liquid range, which tote Android and are nicely high end, devices in the neoTouch range which run Windows Mobile, and devices in the beTouch range which again run Android and occupy the mid to lower ground.

Midfield player: Acer's beTouch E400

As a portfolio, it makes some sense, but with a mishmash of product names and numbers, some of which are overhang from Acer’s acquisition of E-Ten way back in 2008, the whole product line can look a bit confusing. Still, what I have here is the Acer beTouch E400, the flagship of the beTouch range. It runs Android 2.1 and includes the usual top end smartphone trio of features - Wi-Fi, GPS and 3G.

Acer doesn’t always get things right on the hardware design front, but the Acer beTouch E400 is not a bad looking piece of kit. It is an obvious homage to the iPhone 3GS [1], with rounded corners and a strip of white (not iPhone silver) running round the chassis edge. The build materials aren’t as sleek as those of the iPhone though and Acer has opted for four touch sensitive buttons beneath the screen as well as some rather in-your-face branding.

The touch buttons offer search, back, menu and home functions. These are responsive, and in use it helps considerably that the tiniest bit of haptic feedback is initiated and a white backlight illuminates all the buttons when you hit one. The Home button, on the far left, has a circular frame that is barely visible most of the time. When you are charging the phone it glows red while the battery is charging, green when it is fully charged. It is a nice touch.

If you don’t like the black backplate that is on the Acer beTouch E400 when you take it out of its box, you can pop on the provided white or metallic-look red one instead. Acer also provides a screen protector, a slip case and a 2GB micro SD card to bolster the 256MB of Ram built into the device – the card slot is under the backplate. It isn’t a bad extras bundle, but how often you’ll want to actually swap backplates is moot.

Respectable build quality with a change of backplates on offer too

The sides of the Acer beTouch E400 have a predictable array of buttons and connectors. So, on the right there is a camera shortcut and a volume button, on the left the main power button. The bottom houses the microUSB power and charge connector and on the top edge is a 3.5mm headset connector.

In size terms the Acer beTouch E400 is standard fare at 115mm x 59.3mm x 12mm. It weighs an acceptable 125g. The screen size, though, is something of a disappointment. HTC manages to get a 3.7in screen in the only marginally larger (119 x 60 x 12mm) Desire [2] handset. At 115 x 58 x 9.3mm, Apple’s new iPhone 4 offers a 3.5in screen. But Acer has opted for a 3.2in display, which seems rather undersized – at least its 480 x 320 pixels are sharp and bright.

A double tap zooms in when web browsing

The Acer beTouch E400 runs Android 2.1 [3] has five home screens, and you’ve the usual options of populating these with Widgets, shortcuts to applications, individual contacts URLs and suchlike. Acer adds some Widgets to the Android staples including its own Media Player and Web Player, both of which are carousel type affairs.

Social networking gets a look in with Facebook and Twitdroid widgets, and the Acer Spinlets widget is here too. Spinlets is a streaming service that purports to deliver hundreds of songs, videos and TV programmes to your device for free. The Spinlets website [4] says it is exclusive to the Acer Liquid, so clearly that needs updating. There is a bit more to Spinlets than there was the first time I tried it, but it isn’t something I’d come back to time after time.

Web browsing is a reasonable experience. There’s no pinch to zoom support, but a double tap on any spot zooms into it. Text reflows so that you can read without constant left and right panning. Web browsing isn’t the extremely comfortable experience it is on the likes of the HTC Desire, but it passable.

Entering text was surprisingly comfortable. The smallish screen means that in tall mode the Qwerty keyboard is squeezed, but I found slowing down the typing speed somewhat meant I could hit it more accurately, and the predictive text works well. In wide mode I could work faster, and the accelerometer means turning screen orientation is no problem.

Portrait text entry performs better with slower typing – landscape is easier

However there is an irritation in that you need to pop up a separate keyboard if you want numbers or most symbols, though the full stop, comma and a smiley are all on the main Qwerty keypad. When you hit the shift key it locks caps till you hit it again. I like that. Automatic capitalisation after a full stop means the caps lock concept is more handy than capitalisation one key at a time.

The camera shoots at 3.2Mp and has no flash. You can choose ISO settings between 100 and 800 and opt for spot metering, average or centre weighted exposure settings, but both are buried within the menu structure rather than being easily and quickly accessible. Easier to access are photo size options, which offer both 4:3 and 3:2 aspect ratio settings. But there’s no panorama mode and no macro mode either.

Sample Shots

Click for a full-resolution image [5]

Click for a full-resolution image [6]

Click for a full-resolution image [7]

Indoors the camera struggled with light a little and as conditions got darker the images, predictably enough, got worse. The clarinet was photographed with no artificial lighting during the daytime. Outside light was also a problem. The yellow flowers are very over exposed and the sky in the view shot has come out a dreadful white when in fact it was a mix of blue sky and cloud.

Overall performance was fine, until I challenged it having more than half a dozen apps running at once, at which point it started to get a bit fidgety about responding to requests. Inside the E400 is a 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 [8] processor – a fair bit niftier than the 528MHz MSM7225 chip used in the HTC Wildfire [9]. Call quality was fine, with clarity at both ends of a conversation.

Certainly functional, but not outstanding

Battery life was not wonderful. The 1090mAh battery managed to get through the better part of a working day with Wi-Fi switched on, including a bit of Web browsing and a little GPS activity, but by mid evening it was ready for a power boost. As ever with smartphones, a daily charge is the order of the day.

Verdict

Acer’s E400 is the top of the beTouch range, but it isn’t at the top of the Android smartphone range, in general. The screen is on the small side, the camera leaves a bit to be desired, and the processor struggles at times. In terms of specs and capability it is more middle of the road than trailblazing. ®