Acer Tempo X960 - we didn't expect this

Foreword, accessories

By now it’s quite clear that Acer wasn’t joking when they have acquired the Taiwanese company, E-TEN, which you might know for their glofiish series. E-TEN has never been considered as one of the best manufacturers, but in our region their handsets had quite good sales, and they still have. The reason for this is that the manufacturer found the quality level at which the handset doesn’t look like a cheap plastic clone, but it can still be sold at a low price. There is a quite large community now around glofiish handsets, the enthusiastic owners have tons of extras to put on their phones, this being one of the main reasons why they are still good nowadays.

During the Mobile World Congress in February we didn’t yet know what should we expect from Acer. We’ve seen that they’ve invested a lot of time and energy in the press conference held at Casa Batllo (by Gaudi), but the presentation was so dull that many have fallen asleep. I have to make a confession: I took it only until the first couple of announcements, so I’ve been quite surprised when after the dual-SIM DX900 (still sold under the E-TEN brand) we received the Windows Mobile combo handset X960, which is in fact the first real Acer phone, as it has given up all E-TEN customs (in design and software as well), which might even be a good thing from many points of view.

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The handset has been provided by SpeedShop. thanks very much for them! We’re talking about a very new handset over here, it has been launched only this week, so the one I had for testing came in a white cardboard box. Unfortunately the list of accessories is quite short, Acer kept the habit of E-TEN, so we won’t get no leather case or screen protection foil for X960, we have to stick to the usual charger/data cable/headset trio, which is quite poor for a high-end device.

Exterior

I have always liked E-TEN handsets. They were quite square-shaped, they have sometimes used very vivid colors, but they had something… something that didn’t mean much to Acer, but I have to say, when looking at X960, that I don’t miss these things. The new handset looks really cool, its design, shape, colors and the materials used are really elegant. Its size is average, it won’t compete with the smallest of handsets, but the 106.4 x 59 x 13.7 mm and the weight of 131 grams won’t make it a weapon of mass destruction. The front panel is made of a shiny black material, on the sides there is a chromed stripe. The back is the soft plastic usual for these kinds of devices, as it provides a firm grip. Unfortunately the one I had for testing came without a stylus, so I can’t say anything about that. Considering its holder I think it’s a thick, telescopic one.

On top of the front panel we can see the light sensor, the secondary camera and the speaker, while below them there is the TFT touchscreen with a diagonal of 2.8” and a resolution of 480 x 640 pixels; fortunately we can’t complain either about its image quality or its readability. On the bottom there is a small group of buttons, on the two sides there are the call handling keys, while in the middle there’s the circle d-pad and two hotkeys, the key layout being quite fine-looking.

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The designers did a good job with the back panel as well. The part around the camera is raised a bit, but fortunately the handset won’t lie on the lens cover when put upside down on a table. The autofocus camera has a resolution of 3.2 megapixels and there is a whole team around it, as we can see four circles: one of these is the flash, the other is a mirror for self-portraits and the last two are two speakers. Of course they are not stereo (they would be too close to each other anyway), it’s just a matter of design that there are two of them.

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On the top there is a single E-TEN legacy, a GPS label, engraved with a typical font. On the left there is a hook for the wristband, the volume control keys, the reset gap and a hotkey; on the opposite side we can find the power buttons, the microSD slot and the camera’s shoot key. On the bottom there is only a miniUSB connector, so it seems that the standard headphone jack is not one of Acer’s favorites – we can only hope that there will be one on their other devices.

Hirdetés

Hardware, operating system, speed

The handset has the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system, we currently have no information about an upgrade possibility to 6.5. The CPU is a 533 MHz Samsung S3C6410, which is based on a 65 nm ARM1176JZF-S core. This is a CPU that has nice Egy specifications, which hasn’t been previously used in handsets, but we will from now on, and only in other Acers. The CPU can be scaled from 533 MHz-800 MHz, so the one in X960 is clocked at the lowest speed. Its interesting feature is that it has hardware 3D acceleration, it supports OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenGL 2.0 and D3DM, while its raw calculation is speed is four million polygons/second. The number of Windows Mobile devices with hardware 3D acceleration is very low, so there is no software support, which means we won’t really see this feature of X960.

The new device has 128 MB RAM and 256 MB ROM, which is filled with programs, so there is not much free memory left: we have about 80 MB for storing programs and only 30 MB for running applications.

Let’s see the benchmark results:

No matter the hardware 3D acceleration, it seems that the new Samsung processor is not good enough for the VGA display, at least that’s what the really low score of Pocket PC Mark’s graphical benchmark says. During everyday use I didn’t feel the handset that slow, although it’s no speed champion either. Fortunately screen changes are fast and have no lag, but it happened quite frequently that the handset was “thinking” about something and I had to wait a couple of seconds for something to happen.

Acer’s user interface, other extra software

I’ve been surprised that the handset has a rather unique GUI, which is called Acer Shell and it’s in fact a virtual desk. Upon first boot I really couldn’t do anything with it, I somehow like it, as it’s not harder to use than for example HTC TouchFLO, but it looks a bit childish. We can see from the envelope on the desktop if we have a new message or email, or if we have missed a call. We can access the most important apps, but unfortunately we cannot control the music player from here. It’s important that when running Acer Shell, we can see the Start menu, not like for example in the case of Asus. The desktop is three screens large horizontally, we can scroll to the next screen with our finger. It’s funny that we can reorganize stuff, although there are of course some limitations, as we have to keep those things on the desk which are already there, even though it would have been funny to see a CD collection in the window.

When running Acer Shell we can scroll vertically too, in this case we’ll see the quicklaunch menu (pictured below), which looks just like the main menu of iPhone and, what a surprise, it works the same way too – of course it’s still good. The scrolling routine is available on Windows interfaces as well, we can tamper with sensitivity and speed in the settings. The X button won’t just minimize applications, but it closes them, which function cannot be turned off – I wouldn’t even want to turn it off, but there are probably lots of people who like it the other way. Another useful thing is that taskbar elements get larger when we tap them – we’ve seen this on HTC.

There are quite a lot of extra programs. Maybe even too much, compared to the memory size, but fortunately we can uninstall Acer applications if we want to, and later on they can be reinstalled with the help of Application Recovery, as they are stored in the ROM. We have a backup software, a memory optimizer, an easy-to-use task manager and a quicklaunch menu.

We cannot only use the default keyboard for typing, but we also have Acer’s new virtual keyboard. We’ll have some problems entering special characters, but it’s otherwise very good, it’s very similar to iPhone’s solution, so it’s easy to use.

Phone calls, GPS

During phone calls I had no problems with voice quality or signal level, fortunately I didn’t notice a second of delay. The GSM module is quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), and we have three UMTS frequencies to use (850/1900/2100), while the handset supports GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA for data transfer. Besides these we can also use 802.11b/g WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP. There are phone profiles, we can choose between three: normal, vibrating, muted.

Messaging and the contact list are handled by Outlook, which is great, as we can add contacts until there is some free memory, messaging is flawless, and the e-mail client supports attachments and authenticated IMAP servers as well. It’s quite hard to access the factory default contact list, and this has its reason: Acer developed their own phonebook, which is called Speed Dial for some reason – I would have never guessed that this is the phonebook. This is in fact a matrix, with the first letters being placed horizontally, and we can turn the pages with the abc… on the bottom, or with our finger. Contacts with the same starting letter are displayed on the same screen, in two columns, of course alphabetically sorted. It’s quite an easy to use thingy, but we might have some issues if we have a couple of thousands of contacts, as we can’t scroll, just turn the page – this looks good, but it’s slow. Eight contacts fit on one screen with their phone number, so let’s imagine we have sixty contacts with their name starting with B, and we’re looking for the last one.

The globe on the Acer Shell desk won’t launch the browser, but takes us to the bookmarks. Unfortunately we can only use Internet Explorer for web browsing, although we’ve been doing much better with Opera. I can’t say much about the GPS receiver, the phone I’ve been testing had a non-functional Sygic Mobile Navigator on it, and I’m not sure at all, that this has been installed in the factory. iGO8 ran without a problem, positioning was fast and the signal was stable.

Multimedia

The camera has a resolution of 3.2 megapixels, it has autofocus and a LED flash. The highest available resolution for photos is 2048 x 1536 pixels, while videos can be recorded at 640 x 480 pixels. The camera’s software takes about three seconds to launch, focusing isn’t really fast either, but we have all the usual settings like white balance, JPEG compression and the others.

Image quality is average for a PDA. The dynamics range is very low, if we’re taking a photo of a sunny and a dark surface at the same time, we’ll have a burnt in and burnt out picture – the bright parts will be white, the dark parts will be black. X960 isn’t a good friend of colors either, the photos have quite a high level of noise, and there is some detail loss as well, thanks to the noise filter.

Acer has thought of music fans as well, they have developed their own music player, which looks good, but it’s not really good. It displays album art in a cover-flow-like view, which looks really cool if we have the covers, but it’s useless if we don’t, as there is no text list. Another lame thing is that it won’t filter by ID3 tags, so if we have more albums in the same folder, it will randomly display one of the covers – this is probably a software bug, as we should be able to filter by album/artist/genre, it just doesn’t work as it should. During playback we have a unique button layout, which is easy to use, and it’s a good thing that we have some equalizer presets to choose from – the list is quite long, we even have heavy metal. Sound quality is medium on handsfree, but I received no headset with the PDA, so I just had a short test at SpeedShop: it wasn’t very convincing, I’d say it’s also medium quality, which means that it’s good for those who don’t have huge expectations of sound quality.

Battery, summary

The battery has a capacity of 1530 mAh, which has a positive effect on the uptime of X960: the handset can take it for two or three days with a charge, but of course this depends a lot on how much do we use it.

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Summary: X960 has in fact been a pleasant surprise. Acer has managed to leave the usual E-TEN problems behind, the new handset is much a higher quality one than its predecessors were. We’re supplied with software as well, the Acer Shell is rather easy to use, but there is a serious problem with speed and some other stuff, the camera is an average one, there is no standard headset jack, we barely get any accessories (the leather case and the screen protection foil were a default in E-TEN times). All this comes with a price-tag of 400 euros, which is too much for this handset. I’d recommend it for 300, but this way it won’t even get an award.

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

The handset has been provided bywww.speedshop.hu, thanks. Please click here to access the shop.

Specifications

Acer Tempo X960
	Technology	GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 MHz UMTS/HSDPA 850/900/2100 MHz
	Operating system	Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
	Size	106.4 x 59 x 13.7 mm
	Weight	131 grams
	CPU	533 MHz Samsung S3C6410
	ROM / RAM	256 / 128 MB
	Display	2.8” diagonal, 480 x 640 pixels resolution TFT touchscreen display
	Expandability	microSD (SDHC-compatible)
	WiFi	802.11b/g
	IrDA / Bluetooth	no / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	GPS receiver	20 channel NMEA 0183
	Audio	microphone, mono speaker
	Camera	3.2 megapixels, autofocus +VGA resolution for video calls
	Battery	1530 mAh changeable Li-Ion
	Other	-