Acer beTouch E210 Review

Introduction:

The Acer beTouch E210 is a BlackBerry-esque typing-optimized candybar phone that's sure to be easy on the pocket. It sports a similar form factor to its ideological predecessor, which is the Acer beTouch E130, and offers a 2.6-inch resistive screen with a resolution of 320 x 240, a 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor and a 3.2MP camera.

There is little doubt, however, that this phone's strong sides are its comfy to use physical QWERTY and the fact it's powered by Froyo. But is this enough for all these people who want to taste the sweet Android flavour with a BlackBerry-style handset? Read on for our full impressions.

Design:

The Acer beTouch E210's design left some good impressions on us - fair enough, it's not a world beater, but it is a decent enough design for an affordable candybar phone with a physical QWERTY. The handset's body is made of plastic, but Acer has added a touch of class with the chrome-like bezel that's surrounding the phone.



You can compare the Acer beTouch E210 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

Plastic may not be the most premium material from which a device can be made, but nevertheless it has its advantage - phones made of plastic are generally lighter than those made of metal, and the fact is the Acer beTouch E210 weights only 3.88 oz. When we take into account its dimensions (4.53 x 2.46 x 0.45), it's fair to say that's pretty lightweight. All in all, we can conclude from our experience with this handset that it is comfortable to hold and feels good in the hand.

The Acer beTouch E210 offers a 2.6-inch resistive screen with a resolution of 320 x 240, and that naturally means that the items on the screen don't look particularly attractive. Moreover, after a few hours of use finger prints are prominently displayed all over the display.

Under direct sunlight, it's virtually impossible to figure out what's on the screen, but at least the viewing angles of this phone are pretty respectable.


It's hard to argue that the selling point of this phone is its physical QWERTY, and after playing a little bit with it, our impressions are that it's easy and comfortable to use. Even though the buttons are not particularly big, they are raised just enough to ensure typo mistakes are a very unlikely event.

On the front side we have six physical buttons (that's, if we don't take into account the keyboard buttons) - they are located below the screen, with the two large ones, which are the send and the end buttons - are on the far left and the far right sides, respectively. The others - the home, menu, back and search buttons - are centered around the trackpad. There is nothing noteworthy about the above mentioned buttons, and they get the job done, but the same can't be said about the trackpad, which is not very convenient to use. Moreover, it's not very easy to operate on a 2.6-inch resistive display, so the not-so-good trackpad is a real con.


The Acer beTouch E210 sports a clean design - there is nothing on its top and bottom sides, while on the right are the USB charger and the volume rocker, on the left is the 3.5mm headphone jack and on the back is located the 3.2MP camera.

Interface and Features:

Similar to the last Acer phone from the beTouch family that we reviewed - the Acer beTouch E140 - the E210 doesn't support Acer's custom UI, which is called Breeze. As a matter of fact, you get the stock Froyo experience - the only things that deviate from it are a widget that offers pictures, music and movies plus some trademark Acer apps like Spinlets and UrFooz. In addition, there are some pre-installed apps that are available in the Android Market - for example Twidroyd, which is often cited as the best Twitter app and RoadSync, which is an exchange client.



The build-in storage of the Acer beTouch E210 is negligible - it offers 100MB user-accessible memory out of the box, but at least this phone comes with a 2GB microSD card pre-loaded. If that's not enough for you, you can always buy a bigger one - up to 32GB.

Messaging:

Now, we are talking, aren't we? Typing a message on the Acer beTouch E210's physical QWERTY is a quite enjoyable activity, as the keyboard is pleasure to use and there are dedicated buttons for pretty much everything - thanks to this QWERTY, you can take a picture or access messaging or... you name it. The buttons' feedback is quite good and right from the start we felt at home with it.

Internet and Connectivity:

The Acer beTouch E210 possesses all connectivity options we have come to expect from modern smartphones - like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth plus a microUSB port.


There are a few reasons that make sure the overall browsing experience with this phone is not good at all. First of all, the screen is way too small to browse comfortably, and the 320 x 240 resolution doesn't help - text is a little bit hard to read, not to mention that images don't look very impressive - and this is an understatement.

The Acer beTouch E210's display is a resistive one, which means there is no pinch-to-zoom and this leaves us with the zoom-in/zoom-out and double tap options, which are not convenient to use with Android. Moreover, one of the Froyo browser's biggest perks - full Flash support - is not present on this phone, although Flash Lite is supported.


After a cold start, the GPS of this phone managed to locate us within five minutes, while after a warm one it took mere seconds to point our position on the map.

Multimedia:

As with other handsets from the Acer beTouch series, you get nemoPlayer, which plays both movies and music, as well as the stock Android music player. The music capabilities of this phone are somehow limited, which is understandable, and the headphones you receive out of the box get the job done, but don't expect some really loud music or really deep tones.

The Acer beTouch E210 doesn't support certain formats (Xvid, H.264 and DivX), but at least plays smoothly MPEG4 videos with a 480 x 800 resolution. Funny enough, it also plays MOV videos with the same resolution, but for some reason sound is off.

Camera:

The 3.2MP camera of the Acer beTouch E210 makes photos of absolutely horrible quality even for a low-end phone. As expected, it lacks flash, and the bottom end is that you can't rely on this phone's camera. The same applies for its video recording capabilities.

Performance:

The call quality of the Acer beTouch E210 is disappointing. On our side, people sounded a little bit muted, even on maximum volume, and we couldn't hear their voices clearly, although they were legible. We were told by our callers on the other side of the line that we sounded unnatural and a bit digitally. For people in the big cities, it's probably even worse that background noise was easily heard.

This handset is powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor, which is good enough for this phone, and all processes are executed in a timely manner. Moreover, the Acer beTouch E210's battery life is decent, and this device can easily get you through a day of average usage.

Conclusion:

The strong sides of this phone are the fact it comes with Froyo - the Android craze is raging around the world - and its physical QWERTY, which is really comfy to use.

Sadly, its cons overpower the Acer beTouch E210's pros. The browsing experience suffers notably from the low resolution and the small resistive screen. Moreover, this handset's camera makes some truly appalling photos and videos, not to mention that the call quality of the Acer beTouch E210 is not good at all.

If you are in the market for a low-end handset with a physical QWERTY, then you may take a look at the Motorola CHARM - fair enough, it's destined to stay with Android 2.1 until the end of time, and it may be a bit outdated as we're well into 2011 now, but the truth is it's an all around better phone than the Acer beTouch E210.