Mobile phones have emerged in recent years as personal items virtually inseparable from their tech-savvy owners. Coming into their own as extensions of their owners’ personalities and personal styles, as well as do-everything planners and gadgets used to manage and facilitate complicated and packed daily schedules filled with events and activities that the modern person can’t help but be part of. Once only the spare brain of the busy executive with a million meetings to attend and juggle and multiple contacts to contact within the day, mobile phones are now part of everyone’s lives, much like the hectic turmoil they were originally meant to address.
Acer, a Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer, has come to be one of the newest players in the mobile phone market – specifically the latest smartphone segment of the game. They may be more familiar to most users as a desktop and laptop computer manufacturer – in fact, recognized as the world’s largest laptop computer manufacturer, and second only to HP as largest manufacturer overall – and as a company making individual and server-scale data storage equipment as well as PDAs and computer peripherals and display items. However, with their 2008 purchase of the Glofish brand, Acer has stepped with both feet into the high-speed, high-risk smartphone game.
One of the units with which Acer is making this bid for entry into the smartphone business is the Tempo F900, a sleek and stylish number with an immediately impressive exterior. Greeting users out of the box with a 3.8” resistive touchscreen surrounded by a glossy black face panel. Four touch buttons aside from the touchscreen stand for call/answer, home, back and end; these and the three physical buttons (volume control, camera clicker, and power button) are the only non-touchscreen interaction a user will need. Located near the buttons is an easily-accessed microSD card slot, which in contrast to the Touch series’ microSD card slot location (under the battery cover) allows for easy insertion of additional memory.
The bright and high-resolution (800×480 pixels) screen makes the F900 an ideal model for viewing webpages, even better in some respects than the iPhone, whose smaller screen would require scrolling and fitting for most webpages. Even videos play well on the F900’s sharp screen; display aside, however, the screen’s main limitation appears to be its responsiveness and accuracy, especially when compared to similar high-resolution screen phones.
Screen aside, though, the F900’s engine revs high with a Samsung SC3 6410 processor. This Samsung CPU runs at 533MHz, and is supported by 128MB of RAM. While still occasionally lagging under its considerably versatile workload – multiple apps can run, but the CPU seems to struggle a bit when coordinating all of the action. Still, for web browsing and occasional video playing and most day-to-day use the processor manages perfectly fine. This web browsing is left by default to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, although others such as Opera can be downloaded and installed in its place, speeding up and optimizing the web browsing experience, whether running on the WiFi or HSDPA that the model supports.
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