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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There are five screens which you can pepper with widgets and shortcuts, and Acer adds its now familiar media widget. This takes the form of a side-locked scrollable carousel providing thumbnails of images, movies and music. Acer also provides widgets for its own media streaming service called Spinlets.

So far, so good. Sadly, there are some respects in which the Acer beTouch E130 doesn't live up to its promise. One of the most irritating things about the Acer beTouch E130 is that it runs Android 1.6. Using such an old version means that the E130 misses out on several useful and essential features, such as greatly improved webpage rendering, tethering and hotspot support, Flash Player and built-in Exchange support.

Although Acer has made up for the latter by bundling the RoadSync app which allows the wireless synchronisation of corporate email, calendar, contacts and tasks via Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. Still, with so many Android 2.1 and a few 2.2 handsets now available, there's really no excuse for any handset to run older versions.

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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