IT Pro Verdict

The Acer beTouch E130 takes Android and puts it in a smartphone with a BlackBerry-like miniature QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard is well made, and those who spend a lot of time typing text might find it tempting enough to try Android. However, the small, cramped resistive touchscreen is ill-suited for activities such as web browsing, making the Acer beTouch E130 frustrating to use for many people.

By Sandra Vogel

published 8 October 2010

in Reviews

Running at 416MHz, the processor is the slowest we've seen in an Android handset for quite a while. Its lack of speed is especially noticeable if you have several apps running at once or try to do processor intensive activities like render complex web pages. Business users who like fast, zappy, immediate responses to their finger presses will get irritated.

HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth are all here. There is a bit of a compromise on storage with just 512MB built in. You'll need to add a microSD card to get more and you will need one as soon as you want to use the 3.2 megapixel camera which won't take photos without a microSD card in place.

Acer bulks out the standard Android apps with a few of its own. Among them is an FM radio, a lite version of Documents To Go for viewing Word, Excel PowerPoint and PDF files and the Nemo Player for playing media files.

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Sandra Vogel is a freelance journalist with decades of experience in long-form and explainer content, research papers, case studies, white papers, blogs, books, and hardware reviews. She has contributed to ZDNet, national newspapers and many of the best known technology web sites.

At ITPro, Sandra has contributed articles on artificial intelligence (AI), measures that can be taken to cope with inflation, the telecoms industry, risk management, and C-suite strategies. In the past, Sandra also contributed handset reviews for ITPro and has written for the brand for more than 13 years in total.