Review on Acer’s X960 Windows Smartphone

Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company Acer has come forward with the Windows Mobile Smartphone this time viz. Acer X960 Smartphone.

Physical Aspects

Acer X960 measures 106 x 59 x 14 mm. It has a resistive touchscreen that measures 2.8 inches. The phone is easily pocketable because of its comfy size. The screen can display 65k colors at VGA and with 640 x 480 p. Due to the reflective casing over the display; sunlight legibility is not at its best. The remaining of the front surface is coated with the shiny back plastic material that takes up the finger prints clearly on the display. A forward facing camera, an ear piece, a light sensor and some different colored LEDs are seen just above the display.

Besides the display, there are four types of keys namely a home key, call and end buttons, and a GPS key button. There is also a D-pad which is circular in shape. The outside plane of the handset is covered by a chrome band that holds lanyard fixing and volume rocker key. On the left hand side of the phone, you may find customizable shortcut button and at the right side you will find a enclosed microSD card slot, camera shutter button and power button. At the top of the phone, there are no keys. But the bottom of the phone houses a fragile telescopic stylus, the microphone pinhole, headphones, small USB port for charging and headphones.

The rear side of the phone poses with a 3.2 megapixel camera which has an LED flash and auto focusing features. It is coated with the black soft touch paint. It is also equipped with a pair of small speakerphone, a self visual rendering mirror and a Windows logo on it. However, the phone makes a creak sound when ever you make an attempt to hold the device that makes little cheap when you compare with its competitors.

Core Functions

Acer X960 has an average call and audio quality with traces of hiss in both the call directions. Acer X960 is powered up by the 1530MAh battery that gave the average performance lasting 1 to 2 days even in the light use. Signaling and reception of the signals was also fairly average but none of the call was dropped. HSDPA signaling is supported. Using the volume rocker key, it is possible to switch over the phone to either the vibrate or to the silent mode. The speakerphone worked quite well. Voice dialing is not supported in this phone. But speed dialing is included by offering neat panel interface especially for this particular purpose.

The phone is equipped with the poor range of messaging methods and techniques which makes the messaging process little tedious and traditional. Acer’s ‘Easy Keyboard’ seems like bit larger than the normal QWERTY keyboards. Though it is of the bigger size still users are prone to suffer from mistakes and message hacking. Many may get frustrated with the handwriting recognition inputs. Apart from these, IMAP email, MMS, SMS and POP are supported. The phone is ever ready for instant messaging purpose. It comes with the HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, USB, HSUPA and GPS type of networking.

Multimedia Applications

Acer X960 poses with the auto focusing camera with 3.2 megapixel resolution. The camera is equipped with a devoted shutter button and LED flash. Camera does the job of video recording too. It is good at both shooting snaps as well as in capturing the video clips.

For web browsing, Acer is provided with pre-loaded Internet Explorer Mobile 6. Browsing with this makes phone to crawl and also it shows error for uploading each and every page. Totally, web browsing is a big disappointing scam. The phone also lacks 3.5mm headphone port that is a big part of shame to Acer. Music player keeps the users fully entertained even in the absence of headjack. Windows Media Player Mobile app enables user to play videos.

Being a Windows Mobile device, X960 has ‘n’ number of information management applications such as calculator, calendar, notes and alarms. The phone is preloaded with few games and if the user wishes for some more, they can download via the internet. An inbuilt onboard memory of 144MB is supported. The extension of the memory can be done by means of microSD card slot provided in the phone.

Conclusion

Overall, Acer X960 is loaded with plenty of good features and it has a nice spec collections. But unfortunately, Acer fails to throw a high competition in the market since it is not regarded as serious business phone. Sending Emails and typing while sending the messages is somewhat tedious because of its small screen. The phone could have been with much faster processor and good battery since the phone lags and becomes quite sluggish sometimes.

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