Acer beTouch E140 Review

Interface and Features:

Android is a craze that's proving to be irresistible for quite a few phone lovers, and there is little doubt that one of the strongest points of the Acer beTouch E140 is that it comes with Froyo out of the box. That said, you get plenty of Google goodies like Maps, Places, Latitude and, of course, the Android Market. Furthermore, Acer made its mark on the phone's media capabilities by preloading two apps: Spinlets, which is a free streaming network; and urFooz, which lets you create a virtual version of yourself.



Unlike its predecessor, the E110, the Acer beTouch E140's UI is not really customized. It offers two widgets - one with pictures, music and movies and another one which offers three Acer-related options plus Facebook and Picasa shortcuts.  Its phonebook capacity is virtually limitless, since it depends only on your free memory. Speaking of memory, this phone comes with a build-in storage of 256MB and you also get a 2GB microSD card out of the box, which you can always swap for a 32GB one, if the need arises.


Messaging:

A lot of people have come to love the Froyo QWERTY, but it's not working very well on the Acer beTouch E140's 2.8-inch screen. First of all, there is not enough space between the virtual letters, so occasional typo mistakes are unavoidable. Furthermore, it's a little bit hard to press the far left and far right buttons, and usually you end up typing the letter next to it, which is annoying.

Despite the resistive screen, the beTouch E140's virtual keyboard is a responsive one and signs of lag are nowhere to be found. Moreover, the QWERTY is available in both landscape and portrait mode. There is a bad news for all you Swype lovers, though, since this option is not present out of the box.



Internet and Connectivity:

One of the categories where the Acer beTouch E140 truly excels is its connectivity options. Not only it's a quad-band GSM handset (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz), but it also supports UMTS (900, 2100 MHz), as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections plus a microUSB port.

The resistive screen means that pinch-to-zoom while browsing is not present, and all you are left with are the touchscreen zoom-in/zoom-out buttons and the double tap option, both of which are not implemented very well in Android. Furthermore, Flash (which is natively supported by Froyo) is not offered due to the not so powerful processor of the beTouch E140. On top of that, the low resolution of the screen makes browsing everything but comfortable, and picture quality is plain rubbish. Still, it's a low-end phone, so the very presence of Wi-Fi is refreshing.


The Acer beTouch E140 offers the A-GPS option, which is most certainly a perk. Our tests conclude that after a cold start, it was a matter of few minutes for the Acer beTouch E140's GPS to locate us, while it took mere seconds for it to point our position after a warm one.

The Acer beTouch E140 is powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm 7227 processor and we can safely say that it gets the job done, as everything is executed in a snappy manner. Even when we added a live wallpaper, the phone still performed very well, and the lag, which rarely appeared, wasn't particularly noticeable and didn't ruin the experience of using this device, which is quite pleasing for a cheap handset.


Camera:

The 3.2MP camera lacks autofocus and flash, but offers some settings like white balance and brightness. Despite that, the Acer beTouch E140 makes photos with a truly horrible quality.


In optimal conditions, the color saturation is good, although details are practically non-existent, and you can forget to use this phone's camera if there is not enough light present.

With preview mode turned off, it takes 3 to 4 seconds between taking 2 pictures. The bottom line is that you can't rely on this phone if you go on a vacation to, say, Paris, and want to take pictures of the Arc de Triomphe, or, anything else, really.




Acer beTouch E140 Sample Video:





Multimedia:

Most of the affordable handsets don't offer great music-playing capabilities and indeed the Acer beTouch E140 doesn't deliver in this category. To start with, the speaker is not particularly loud, and the quality is average. The same applies to the headphones - they produce some average sounds, but there is no chance to hear your music, while in the heart of the city. The well-familiar Android music player is offered, and as with the beTouch E110, you get Nemo Player out of the box, with which you can play both music and movies.


When we talk about low-end phones, it's a bit too optimistic to expect them to support, say, Xvid. The beTouch E140 plays videos only in MPEG-4 format, but we are pleasantly surprised that its maximum resolution is as high as 480 x 800.