Acer beTouch E130 review

The Acer beTouch E130 marries a mini QWERTY keyboard and Android at a low price. For some it will be a match made in heaven, but others will want a quickie divorce. Read on to find out why.

The Acer beTouch E130
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.

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In our experience battery life lasted for up to two days of use, but what you get will inevitably depend on how much you use power sapping features such as GPS, Wi-Fi, music playback and 3G data.

The Acer beTouch E130 is relatively cheap, but compromises have been made to reach the price. Even if you're willing to wait for Acer to issue an upgrade to a more modern version of Android, its usefulness will be limited by the small screen and slow processor.

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.

Connectivity: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 850/1900 or 900/2100

Display: 320 x 240 pixels, 2.6in

OS: Android 1.6

Camera: 3.2 megapixels

GPS: A-GPS

Processor: ST Ericsson PNX6715, 416MHz

Bluetooth: v2.0

Wi-Fi: 802.11 b/g

Dimensions: 115 x 62.5 x 11.5 mm

Weight: 109g

Battery: Li-Ion 1500 mAh

Sandra Vogel
Sandra Vogel
Freelance journalist

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.

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