Acer beTouch E210 is BlackBerry-style Android phone
Acer takes on BlackBerry with the beTouch E210, an Android 2.2 smart phone with an optical trackpad and all the usual Android goodies.
If we'd had a penny every time we heard someone say, "I would switch from my BlackBerry to Android, but I like the keyboard," we'd have, well, about 7p, but you get the idea. Acer has seen a gap in the market and pounced, with one of the first Android phones we've seen to look like something from the fruit-based smart phone manufacturer.
The Qwerty keyboard has the potential to be pretty good -- each of the keys is rounded, which has made for a good typing experience on similar phones we've seen. There's also an optical trackpad, which will either delight or frustrate depending on how well Acer has made the thing.
There isn't much room left on the phone for the display, which is a 2.6-inch jobbie with a resolution of 320x240 pixels. We're keen to see how sharp email text will be when we test it, as other Android phones with this resolution tend to be rather blurry. That said, they also tend to have larger screens, so that may mitigate against blurriness here.
Inside, it's a fairly standard Android phone running version 2.2. There's HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a humdrum-sounding 3.2-megapixel camera. Acer has chucked in an FM radio, though, and it's relatively light at 110g. The company hasn't said how long the battery will last beyond that there will be "plenty of hours of work and fun in total freedom". Cheers for that.
Other specs include a proper 3.5mm headphone jack, a microSD slot that supports up to 32GB of storage, a compass and accelerometer.
Expect to see silver and black versions of the E210 appearing on 11 March for an as yet unannounced price.