Acer M900 Review

Camera:

We are pretty happy to see that the camera interface has been improved alongside of the version on the X960. All icons are larger and handier to press with your bare finger and this is something we quite like. You will be able to fiddle with several color effects, white balance, ISO sensitivity and take a pick among 8 scene presets. The interface takes about 4 seconds to start, while focusing and saving a snapshot take about 2 and 5 seconds respectively. These results make the M900 a decent performer in terms of speed.

We didn’t expect the 5-megapixel camera of the Acer M900 to deliver high quality pictures, because this is a business oriented device that doesn’t lay claims in this department. Having seen the test shots however, we found out the situation was entirely different. The level of details is above average in snapshots taken in natural light, colors look realistic and saturated with only the exposure being slightly underdone. Who would have thought that a business handset would be able to take such nice snapshots indeed? Well, the results aren´t as good in artificial lighting conditions and the flash manages to properly light up objects that are about 1 to 1,5m away. The interesting thing about the camera is that despite the lack of manual macro, focusing is proper in this mode and snapshots come out great even with automatic focusing, so you won´t have to worry about reading that important office paper you have just taken a snapshot of.





Unfortunately, video capture is below par. Resolution of 640x480 pixels looks good in theory, but the situation is actually, quite bad. There are too many artifacts, huge-sized squares and as a whole, the quality is rather low. It´s like watching a low-resolution video on a high-resolution screen. 

Acer M900 sample video with 640x480 pixels resolution


Multimedia:

Well, even people who tend to wear suits daily need some entertainment. The Acer M900 is designed to be a business oriented cell phone above all, but delivers multimedia functionality as well. Compared to other Windows Mobile handsets, the Media Player of the Acer M900 is an apt performer.  MP4/H.264 videos with resolution width of 720 pixels play without a hitch and the handset provides perfect experience even with DivX content. Only Xvid videos won’t play in the integrated player. The sound coming out of the loudspeaker is of good quality, although not nearly loud enough. The boxed pair of earphones pack some punch indeed, although sound turned out to be somewhat muffled.