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First look at Acer beTouch E110

Design, Materials

The phone comes in a very unpretentious package, which is what you'd expect from an affordable phone - the E110 is made of matte plastic with silver inserts around the perimeter. All in all, it's the epitome of a candybar-shaped communicator, with most of its front face's real estate occupied by the touch-sensitive screen.

Few will find its design repulsive or astonishing - since there's not much to hate or love in it.

The E110's casing isn't a finger-print magnet, plus thanks to its very pocketable size, it is quite palm-friendly. Acer's booth featured two color schemes for the phone: black and blue, but I think nobody will get offended by a more lively red or white edition.

Controls

The E110's no-frills concept definitely has its own merits - for example, instead of experimenting with controls, like many other phone makers do these days, Acer decided to run with the time-proven five-way navigation button and mechanical Call and End keys.

Although they did throw in a couple of touch-sensitive buttons as well - all auxiliary controls found right underneath the display are touch-sensitive, the bad news is that they are all pretty slim and tiny, thus somewhat fiddly to use.

Housed on the left-hand side is the volume rocker along with the sealed microSD memory card slot. Unfortunately, there is no dedicated camera button - probably a bad example they've carried over to the E110 after seeing too many HTC's phones. Sitting on the top is the 3.5mm audio jack. On the right there is a miniUSB socket for chargers and data cables.

Display

The E110 enjoys a no-frills 2.8-inch resistive display with a resolution of 230x240 pixels - in all honesty, that's not the resolution an Android-based phone should have, it's simply too small to house its interface. But since the E110 is an entry-level Android device, I suppose it's worth taking it easy.

The screen's response time is fairly good, if anything, the phone doesn't come packaged with a stylus.

User Interface

The Acer beTouch E110 boasts Acer's proprietary UI add-on for Android 1.5. The inetrface is divided into five screens, and the currently active one is highlighted by a dot at the foot of the screen. Even though all icons and fonts are huge and easy to navigate around with bare fingers, they look bricky.

People in the know told me that the presence of a pretty unknown platform ST Ericsson PNX6715 and Acer's proprietary interface in the E110 make it a very unappealing product as far as Android 1.6 and 2.1 updates go. In other words, there is a chance that we will see firmware updates, but from a technical standpoint, the end just doesn't justify the means - Acer's developers will have to spend entirely too much time and resources on such projects.

Platform

The E110 runs on ST Ericsson PNX6715 with a 416 Mhz CPU, 256 Mb of RAM and 256 Mb of storage space (plus there is support for microSD memory cards).

While on paper it may seem like one of the weakest Android-powered phones to date (hardware-wise), in reality the E110 turns out to be a pretty speedy device.

The E110 comes armed with a 3.2 MP camera - not much I can tell you here. On the downside it doesn't have WiFi, even though there is GPS.