We take a look at what happens when long-time computer maker Acer tries its hand in the smartphone arena.
PETALING JAYA: The Acer F900 has one of the better and more well-thought out packages for a smartphone. It comes with software, an extra stylus, handsfree kit, screen protector and even a protective pouch. The volume rocker on the top right side of the phone also doubles as a list scroller.
The F900 is a slim but very wide and tall phone because of the large screen. It is solidly built with sturdy plastic and has a metal battery cover and metal accents.
The massive 3.8in resistive screen is in 16:9 ratio. It’s a joy to watch videos on it and the colours are vibrant.
However legibility under sunlight like most phones is less than desirable. In addition to the fully touchscreen interface, there are four touch-sensitive buttons below the screen: Accept, Windows, Back and Cancel.
The buttons don’t light up until you touch one of them so you might not notice their existence there in the first place.
Acer customisations
The Acer development team have actually put in quite some effort to replace the Windows Mobile 6.1 Today screen with something more usable.
The screen shows a desktop (no, really, it’s a desk) and you can sweep you finger to the left and right to access other features such as your SMS, e-mail, calls, calendar, weather, photos, music, time zone settings and program shortcuts that are on the desktop.
Sweep your finger up or down to get an icon-based display of all the options on the desktop which in my opinion is more useful as you can see all the options without having to scroll.
Functionality
Call quality was satisfactory. Video calls are not supported because there is no forward facing camera. The Acer Shell also did a good job of assisting in scrolling through the contact list using the Speed Dial feature.
The F900 comes with the usual litany of productivity applications that most smartphones have nowadays. You have the usual calendar, alarms and Office Mobile so you can work on your Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
Outlook works flawlessly in managing your e-mail. Typing e-mail and text messages was quite speedy thanks to Acer’s customisation and tweaking of the on-screen keyboard.
Like any other modern high-end phone, the F900 covers most connectivity options. It offers GSM, GPRS, 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth.
All of the transmitters can be turned off in Flight Mode for use in hospitals and on planes. The microUSB port is used for data transfer, connecting the handsfree as well as for charging. The F900 has pretty good battery life as it lasts about four days on a full charge.
Most phones in the market now have an accelerometer which allows you to tilt the phone to one side to view the screen in landscape mode. The F900 accelerometer only works on a few applications out of the box.
You have to select the applications that are affected by the “Gravity Sensor” application so that the accelerometer will work on the applications you want. The special bit about the F900’s accelerometer is you can tilt the phone to either side to view the screen in landscape mode rather than to only one side.
Media handling
A 3.2-megapixel camera may not seem like much but the good news is it produces good colour for daylight shots. The indoor shots are a little inconsistent because the white balance could cause some shots to appear too white. Photos can also be geo-tagged.
Videos taken by the F900 are encoded into 3gp files. The videos were over-compressed and you can see that gradations are blocky. Media playback is a mixed bag.
There is support for WMV, 3GP and MP4 but unless your MP4s are encoded with the correct codec, you get a stuttering effect. MP3 playback on the speaker is too soft to be heard.
However, sounds were wonderful with the supplied earphones. The only grouse is there is no 3.5mm audio jack so you’re stuck with the supplied headset.
There is a slot for a microSD card but the F900’s package does not come with one so I had to insert my own. The notable thing is that the microSD card is hot-swappable and you can use it as soon as you slip it in without rebooting the phone.
Radio, Browsing, GPS
The radio feature requires the headset to be plugged in. However, reception was not as good as I hoped. It improved when I went to a higher floor, but was still scratchy. Browsing was fast and smooth and with the large screen on the F900, surfing was a real joy.
After installing Google Maps on the F900 to test the GPS, I found that the locking speed was very, very quick. And I was in my home under the roof! The GPS response is one of the fastest I’ve ever tested on a smartphone.
It seems the SiRF Star III GPS chip which has been talked about a lot is one of the fastest and best GPS chips around in the market currently.
User experience
On the specs sheet, the phone is a beautiful machine. However, things could have been much better in actual use.
The Acer Shell is a nicely designed user display that eases the use of Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphones but it takes 20MB of memory to load. The animations on it were less than impressive because of the lag.
The F900 also did hang on several occasions and neither the soft reset button nor the power button would work so the only way to reboot it was to remove the battery.
Now, I understand that if you were to run too many applications simultaneously, it could cause any phone or computer to hang but I just cannot understand why sending an SMS would hang the phone.
The SMS queuing system is also problematic especially when you send multiple SMSes. If the phone hangs and you restart it, the queue starts again and the SMSes (regardless of those sent or not) are sent all over again.
If the phone gives a low battery notification, it unlocks the screen which can cause you to fire off some calls if it is in your pocket or bag. So it is best to keep the phone charged to avoid this.
One small example of how much improvement Acer needs to do on the user experience is the backlight setting.
If you were to put the brightness to the minimum setting, the whole screen goes black.
So, if you were to press something else and get out of the setting screen, it’s up to your ingenuity to get the screen back up to a visible level.
Conclusion
My experience with the phone turned out to be a mixed bag. While things looked great in terms of hardware and the packaging was fantastic, the software portion didn’t do perform as well as I would have liked.
But since Acer is just getting into the market, I guess they still have room for improvement. Furthermore, in my opinion Windows Mobile 6.1 is a poor OS and it’s really about time everyone shifted to the upcoming 6.5.
Kudos to Acer for their effort though. Hopefully their future efforts will yield better results.
Pros: Sturdy construction; full-featured; good battery life; awesome GPS speed
Cons: Slow; unstable at times.
F900
(Acer Inc)
3G smartphone
Camera: 3.2-megapixels; autofocus; LED flash; video recording
Display: 3.8in TFT resistive screen (480 x 800-pixels); 65,000 colours
Operating system: Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
Messaging: SMS, MMS, e-mail
Connectivity: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, HSDPA 900/2100, Bluetooth, microUSB, WiFi
Expansion slot: microSDPhone
Memory: 128MB SDRAM; 256MB Flash memory
Battery: 1,530mAh lithium-polymer
Standby/talk time: 300 hours/6 hours
Other features: SiRF Star III GPS (A-GPS) chip, FM radio
Weight: 150g
Dimensions (w x d x h): 63.5 x 12.9 x 117.5mm
Price: RM2,099
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