Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the software tour of the Acer tempo Emma 900 now Acer has added a lot of software to the M 900 a lot of it comes from the OD 10 devices and that's kind of unfortunate because it's kind of haphazardly thrown together software but there is some new and cool stuff and we're gonna go through that now we're gonna cover everything in full detail on the final review of pocketnow.com you just heard I got an email so this is this this is the shell they call this Acer shell and basically it's a three looking interface that's trying to emulate the desktop experience so you have an a envelope on your desktop which implies email and it tells you the day in the the time and your next appointments so let's go through all these items a lot of these things are hot linkable so if we tap on the little envelope we are taken to our email and a very touch flow-3d like display so we can flick our finger to go through our email it's kind of a slow way to go through the email I think I much rather go right into the inbox but it's a it's a visually pleasing to go through your messages another thing you can do is tap where it says messages here and see the same kind of display and tap through your text messages if we tap on where it says today we are taken to our calendar just a quick link to the calendar if we tap on the device right there it'll actually take you to your call history and the one implies that I've got one missed call if we tap on the date over here we are taken into kind of a world traveler time display so we can you know choose between Philadelphia where we are now we can go to London and I'll spin the globe this part is kind of a novelty I'm not sure why it needs to have a picture of where it is on the map but it looks kind of nice if we tap on the window we will actually get the weather and the weather for the cities that are pre-configured based on the previous screen where you said in the cities that you want to see for the time so we can tap to London and see the weather in London and again the globe moves and shows you exactly where you're going so a nice way to kind of get the weather on this interface let's go back okay now let's flick to the next panel over to the right so from here we can access our pictures photo gallery so if we tap on the picture frame we are taken to a very touch flow 3d like interface where we can flick our finger up and down and go through the pictures and if we tap on a picture it'll open up in the Acer gallery and from there you can email a picture set it as background and do all those sorts of things if we tap on the rolodex we'll actually get a list of people that we call on a regular basis a bunch of pictures if there's a picture assigned to their their contact card you'll get their picture if not you'll just get another placeholder icon so this is kind of a quick way to dial people though I much rather press the call start button and go to my recent call list and just go right into the the person I want to call finally over here there is a button or a section for media playback and it'll show you the album art if there is any and you can play music right from here you can manage your media just like you would on an HTC device in the media tab I think a lot of this comes from touchflo 3d and again if you tap on the window here you can see the window is kind of continued you will get the weather one more over to the right this is the final part of the shell if we tap on what looks to be a I don't even know what that is it looks like a calculator but it's not you tap on that it'll give you a program launcher called the Quick Menu again this comes right out of touch flow 3d if we tap on the ruler and the pen we are taken to some links to do things on our device that we want to do like change the backlight adjust sound profiles communication manager things like that and finally if we tap on the picture of the globe we get our internet favorites as they are set and pocket Internet Explorer although it looks kind of crappy on the screen but the letters are jumbled together so it doesn't look well optimized for this this device now this mobile shell uses twenty megabytes of RAM and for a device that already has a huge deficiency of program memory for such a high-end device here I'll show you right now that's a big problem so right now we only have 23 megabytes of program memory free meaning you're not going to get a lot of multitasking out of this if you unload them the shell program or take it off you actually get 40 megabytes free which is still very very low and if I go into the task manager I'll show you what's open right now pretty much nothing ActiveSync calendar and the task manager and we only have 23 megabytes of free program memory available so I am going to turn off the show for the rest of this demonstration okay so here we are in programs and we're gonna go throw a few things right now in terms of screen sensitivity the screen sensitivity is quite good it's not as good as the touch pro2 or the diamond tube but it's probably a little bit better than the old touch Pro in the old diamond and at at times there's I think a bug with the screen where you have to press on an icon several times in order for the press to get registered you maybe you'll see that during this demonstration and also a note on screen rotation speed it's very very fast it's almost as fast as the touch pro2 just about instant so that is not a problem alright so let's go through this let's go to multi media so this does have an FM radio which is good it's it'll look familiar if you're used to the old e 10 devices it wants you to attach a headset so a simple FM radio camera 5 megapixel camera we're gonna cover photo quality in full in the review streaming players so that you can watch em youtube.com and album is the photo album again we'll talk about all this stuff in detail let's get to some more interesting stuff let's see what we have in utilities we have the backup utility which is a simple backup program that lets you backup certain parts of your device and it looks like it's backing up right now and I don't want it to do that memory optimization which is actually kind of funny it'll automatically reset your device on a scheduled basis so that it clears out all of the programs in RAM and this may actually be a good idea to use this because there's such a deficiency of RAM on the DM 900 and then we have a program for a GPS and here's the Communication Manager which has been skinned a little bit for the the Acer device going down and by the way it does have flix scrolling although sometimes it's a little clunky and goes a little too much or not enough going down we have some other things like zoom status which is actually pretty cool if you remember in the HTC touch pro if you tapped on the notification areas you would get these zoomed in buttons so that they're much larger well the same is the case here in the EM 900 except I think it's done a little nicer so we can close things or we can go back up there and tap on this memory manager which will actually give you a test manager and you can see how much free RAM you have or stop all of the applications but let's go back to where we were before missed it there and so that is zoom status I installed Skyfire in Opera Mobile this doesn't come with a better browser like Skyfire Opera Mobile but of course those browsers are free to download twe Keaney is an awesome Twitter client by the way and let's go into settings because there's some interesting stuff in there to talk about so let's talk about the biometric security right it has a fingerprint scanner built into the bottom which can be used in several different ways it can be used and see the screens not responding here comes let me swipe my finger it can be used to unlock your device after it comes out of standby so let's say when you power it on you want the prompt to come up to swipe your finger or you can have when your calendar contacts tasks or inboxes opened a prompt comes up to swipe your finger so I'm gonna do this I'm going to turn off the device and then turn it back on and it should prompt me to swipe my finger yep there we go so I can't do anything unless I swipe my finger sensitivity is really great on the biometrics and of course to edit any settings in the golden finger application you have to swipe your finger you can also protect a folder on your device with the security I'm going to need the stylus now because things are getting kind of small down here you can actually protect a folder which is cool and this is how you register our finger it's very easy you swipe your finger four times and there are some other settings here so it's a pretty cool application to use if you want to have an added level of security for your device if you're afraid that someone's going to pick up your phone at work we can also change the today's soft keys you can customize them so right now it's set to speed dial and private folder but there's a whole host of things we can choose which is great a lot of devices don't let you customize the soft keys okay let's go over to system we have some unique entries to talk about here this device has an accelerometer but it only works in certain screens that you dictate so it's not working right now but if I tap on the icon I can choose which program DG sensor will work in so obviously you want to do something like Internet Explorer if you're using Skyfire in office mobile you don't want to have it turned on in all screens because it really doesn't make sense to have it rotate especially because you have the slide-out keyboard to automatically rotate it at any time and you can adjust the sensitivity which is great so that if you're walking down the steps and you jiggle your device it doesn't actually accidentally go into the landscape orientation now here's something real cool you can actually use the biometric pad for more than just security you can use it for navigation you can use it as an eight-way d-pad a four way rocker a joystick a mouse a touch stick although I'm not really sure the difference between a lot of these if we use the mouse watch this it'll give you a tiny little mouse on the screen very very small you see it over there I think it's a little too small to be usable but it'll definitely help a little bit with one-handed usability I've been keeping it on the d-pad setting because it gets way too sensitive when then when you're using it has a mouse in addition you can actually tap down on the button gently or the the security pad and have it select so if I go to the Start menu let me try to get the little mouse up to the Start menu and I tap it'll open up the Start menu so pretty cool they're added functionality so again I like to leave it on the d-pad and that way I can move my finger to the left it doesn't always work so well but it's a good feature to have if you can get used to the the feel of the swiping your finger and adjust the sensitivity so it's just right you can't really help for one-handed usability and kind of bring back a deed the d-pad because you know of course the touch pro2 doesn't have a d-pad or any way to have a multi directional input method down here okay so let's go down to see if there's anything else that's interesting something called touch control which will actually stimulate the sensitivity of the flick scrolling nothing too interesting there and over in connections they do have a connection wizard that is supposed to configure your device to what carrier you are on I'm using this on AT&T in the u.s. I'm getting HSDPA but for some reason when I choose AT&T from the drop-down list it doesn't configure the device properly so here it is 18 t Wireless I had to manually put in the settings to get it to work so overall I'm not too impressed with the software on the ma900 I find that the Acer shell program that we talked about the beginning it's kind of a ripoff of touchflo 3d it doesn't really bring anything unique it doesn't have much utility it's a lot of it's a novelty it looks kind of cool the concepts interesting but the implementations not that great it requires a lot of screen taps also the software on the M 900 is somewhat buggy in terms of flick scrolling it doesn't always work right or works too fast or too slow sometimes icons don't select when you tap on them also another weird behavior is that my internet connection settings which I've had enter manually sometimes disappear for no reason within the last few days they just disappear I'm gonna try hard resetting this and bringing it back to factory condition maybe not installing all of the software that comes on it because it gives you the option to check or uncheck certain pieces of software anyway we're going to cover everything in full in the review on pocketnow.com if you haven't seen the unboxing or hardware to our video I'll put it up on the screen right now and you can get to those and again the M 900 right now is shipping it clove technology that's clove co uk and its cost about $80 less than the touch pro2 and it of course it does u.s. 3g which a lot of people will be happy about so we'll be back with a full review soon that's it for now