The Acer beTouch E400 – Twitter Friendly Smartphone

Posted by Geronimo Boosh on March 8, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Acer is in the running for a good looking and great performing smartphone. The Acer beTouch E400 is also running the super popular Android operating system for even more appeal. Take a look at all the details Acer has put into their latest work.

If you have been watching the onslaught of smartphones with their slim looks and plastic covers, the beTouch E400 adds one more to the fray. This particular smartphone comes in three colors, black, ceramic white, and pearl red. You can change the battery cover to get a different “look”. The E400 is 115 millimeters tall by 59.3 millimeters wide by 12 millimeters thick. It manages to be just over the size of a few other competitors in its class but not by much. It is still under a half an inch in thickness and weighs 125 grams, which is also in the same ballpark as other smartphones with similar abilities.

The Acer beTouch E400 is average in many respects. It has a screen size of 3.2 inches and a screen resolution of 320 by 480 pixels. This is roughly the same as the latest version of the iPhone 3GS. The Acer family has a thing for colored LED lights. They are using them for notices, such as the “home” button. It changes colors to let you know when the battery is getting low or if you have a new text message or miss a call. It comes in handy if you are in a meeting and can not get an audio alert.

The screen on the E400 is bright, but underwhelming. It is made to be used with a stylus. If you do not have one you can use your fingernail or anything else handy. It comes with 256,000 colors. The screen will do the acrobatics for you automatically if you turn it on its side. Acer has done a feat by mixing just the right percentage of on-screen keyboard with the right amount of area for text. When you need to send out a text, it is easy and fast. The screen also shows a digital compass or magnetometer for those who like the “official” word for it.

The inside workings of the Acer beTouch E400 are where this smartphone really shines. It uses the Android operating system with Acer´s own flavor. This means you can see Facebook and Twitter, along with other social networking sites and stay in contact without a hitch. “Twidroid” is built in to the beTouch. This is one of the up-and-coming Android apps that is made just for Twitter and Android. It allows you to post pictures, message directly and receive background notifications. The social-mobile world is covered fairly well with this new smartphone. The Android 2.1 Èclair version is the system that covers all this and soon, it will cover more. Android apps are coming out hard and heavy and soon every Android-enabled phone will have an unimaginable amount of applications to put to good use.

The Acer beTouch E400 manages Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files so you can use this for work as well as for play. It also handles Adobe portable files. There are google maps that show street view, traffic and POI search. Acer Sync is included. This allows those who also own an Acer notebook to let the beTouch “talk” to their notebook. You can synchronize your calendar, google contacts and schedule without doing anything. The E400 does it for you.

The camera for this unit is a bit weak at 3.15 megapixels. It also has no flash. It does have autofocus, geotagging and video. The processor is no slouch and runs at a respectable 600 megahertz. You get a stereo FM radio when you need the local news or weather.

Acer designed their E400 to run on quad band GSM and HSDPA networks for voice transmission. The data networks it can use are EDGE, WLAN ( Wi-Fi ), GPRS, Bluetooth, 3G and a MicroUSB connector. It has plenty of ROM and RAM and you can use a MicroSD card if you happen to run out of room. This is a good all-around phone that should be a little cheaper than the major models, but the price has not yet been announced. It comes out in April of this year.