
Barcelona — Acer might have entered the smartphone fray a little late, but it is making up for that by announcing a staggering eight new models, all of which will ship this year. The phones were unveiled last night at a special event in the wilds of Barcelona as part of the Mobile World Congress event.
The phones are aimed at every conceivable demographic, a point hammered home by a succession of Acer executives. (Hint to Acer speechwriters — don’t have your CEO joke about "being the only thing keeping 200 people for dinner" and then have him bang on about "segmenting the long tail" for another half hour before even mentioning the phones). The only things they have in common are Windows Mobile — the old version, not the shiny new 6.5 version just unveiled by Steve Ballmer, and the screens — and that they are all touch screens.
Instead of listing all the specs (you’d just fall asleep), we’ll take a look at two standouts in the range (pictured below). The M900 is Acer’s Blackberry-a-like, an email machine with a slide out QWERTY keyboard. The phone is loaded with Microsoft Office Mobile and also Outlook. The screen is a decent 3.8" and the phone also has a 5MP autofocus camera, GPS and an FM radio. Price is unknown, but we should see the M900 in the next couple of months.
At the other end of the range is the F900, an almost willfully dull phone. The handset is all touch, with a 3MP camera and, well, that’s it really. There are the usuals – MP3 player, calendar – but nothing that makes this any more compelling than any other WinMo cellphone. Nothing, that is, except the price. Acer plans to have these coming in for pennies after carrier subsidies.
This pricing shows that Acer is planing to flood the smartphone market and turn it into the same commodity game that we see in the PC industry. Take a look at the netbook market, for instance. All netbooks are essentially the same. Same processor, same OS (Windows XP, usually) and same size. The only differences are the keyboards and the occasional outbreak of Linux. Acer will bring this same homogeneity to the smartphone market. And once the company gets Android in there (the Acer engineer says there is nothing lined up yet, but his smile said that Android is coming), it might be over for everybody else.
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