Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Medellin from pocketnow.com and this was the hardware and software tour of the ACE RB touch e two hundred this is a windows mobile 6.5 slider device it's relatively inexpensive - it cost about three hundred and fifty dollars over at clove which is pretty cheap for a device that is unlocked in that does 3G although not in the US here in Europe you'll get 3G HSDPA HSUPA but in the US you will only get edge so let's take a look at the B touch e two hundred the screen is three inches diagonal and the resolution is four hundred down and 240 across so that would be WQ VGA a lot of newer devices have much higher resolution screens than this but of course this is a budget device so that's what you get up here we have the speaker down here's the Acer logo with a traditional d-pad and in the center if you press the button inward it will select you have call and and call start what's the missing down here and what is really unfortunate is that it doesn't have a button for ok or closed which is very important in Windows Mobile or a start menu button so a lot of the time you have to reach up with your thumb to close a program or to hit the Start menu whereas a lot of other windows mobile devices say like the touch pro you know have the Start menu button and the OK button built right into the bottom of the phone so that's a little bit of an annoyance if we slide down the phone we're actually slide it up we get the t9 style numeric pad so if you are good at t9 then this will be familiar terra-tory to you but if you like a hardware keyboard that you're gonna have to get used to this or you can use the on-screen keyboard which is better than the default windows mobile keyboard but not too great it's got a nice brushed metal coating and as you saw before it actually is it's actually backlit so the numbers light up when the conditions get dark it's not doing it right now and this is actually a functional slider which is pretty cool so if somebody calls and you want to answer the call slide it open to answer slide it down to hang up so it's always nice to see a functional slider there let's go around the side of the device here we have a standby button and also you can take the phone out of standby by opening the slider as you just saw we also have a volume up and down rocker then we have mini USB for syncing charging and for audio this does not have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack unfortunately it's not really made to be a multimedia device with you know a small screen like this on the bottom we have the microphone over here we have the dual action camera button so it has autofocus but no flash although it does have 3.2 megapixels here's the stylist this is a resistive touchscreen so you have this kind of cheap collapsible stylus that you can take out from the side the sides are adorned in this silver and the front is kind of black with the brushed metal the back has that nice rubbery coating that makes it feel secure in hand that said in hand feel while it's secure is kind of low quality acer's build quality is notoriously low and we can pop off the back battery cover by going over here back here we have the we have the battery with the SIM card and the micro SD card slot which is right here unfortunately you have to take out the battery to access that then down here you can see the speaker and up here is of course the camera so let's put this back on and we're going to talk about the software on this device okay so here we are with the Acer B touch e two hundred turned on and what you'll notice right off the bat is the home screen comes right from the Acer neo touch which is actually the Snapdragon running Windows mobile device that we actually reviewed very highly because it was one of the fastest devices we've ever tested unfortunately the bead touch 200 is not nearly as fast so this is really just a simple program launcher so we can hit the little gear down here and we can add new programs and we can flick through I'm just using a stylus because it's easier to use while filming although it does have good finger friendly operation the screen is relatively sensitive not nearly as sensitive as we found on say the HTC Touch pro2 for example so we can add say file explorer and check off there so very simple no frills home screen which is good and bad there's no eye candy but then again there's really no there's no really extended functionality here you can hit you can open the Start menu by tapping down here and it's nice that they added that because otherwise you'd have to reach up to the top all the time and when you're in a program you do have to reach up to the top all the time to open the Start menu so you're using it here with your thumb d-pad d-pad you have to reach up and you get the idea from there so tapping this stepping this button on the Left will unlock or will lock the device and it takes a moment to go into the lock screen and here we are standard windows mobile 6.5 lock screen then slide to the right the upper right corner we have a quick link to the built-in task manager so it's not an Acer Skin task manager but it's nice that they put it over there this device says 256 megabytes of RAM which is pretty good for a budget device let's go to the Start menu and flick around and see what we have here so we have all the standard stuff internet explorer mobile you're probably going to want to install opera mobile 9.5 or Skyfire to get a better browsing experience so let's take a look at social networking and we saw this on the other a sir device you can see it tends to be a little bit slow and as a 520 megahertz processor so from here we can launch the built-in Facebook application which is standard to Windows Mobile now and a lot of these other things will take you right to the website so if we go to YouTube it's going to open up a little YouTube application actually that Acer built and we're going to click on the region here and we're not going to cover the YouTube application but it basically is a mobile skinned version of the website so it's a little bit more easily digestible in such a small screen so I'm gonna exit from here and we're gonna exit from here and we'll go back from the start menu see what else is in here so we have standard stuff like agenda which is the obviously the built-in calendar which has been skinned a little bit and again we saw this in the other Acer device the Neo touch it's a little nicer way to view your your your different appointments so we can tap on a certain day and then we can click on today to get right to today and we can go to the next month or the previous month and so you get the point here's sort of the agenda view so nicer way to view your calendar than what is built into Windows Mobile standard so here we have marketplace and entry for multimedia streaming media player obviously so you can watch mobile YouTube and over here album which is just a slightly more glorified photo album than once you get on the default Windows Mobile you can slope swipe to the right swipe to the left obviously no multi-touch so you can't pinch to zoom or anything like that and here's where the lack of ok button kind of becomes a problem because you can't press an OK button to quickly get out you have to tap on the screen you have to find the back button and then you proceed from there okay let's scroll down further see what else we have here Communications Manager really standard stuff this one's also a little bit different preferences so here we can go into connections and see the sort of Acer skinned connection manager which is a little bit nicer we can go into phone to determine certain things about the phone these are just taken from the standard Windows Mobile settings just made to look a little bit nicer for the Acer be touch e200 let's go down a little bit and let's go into the on-screen keyboard so you can get a sense for how that looks and how it feels on a device like this okay so let's test the on-screen keyboard I'm just gonna tap here to bring it up and it's kind of small because obviously this is a three inch screen the unscreened keyboard itself on these Acer devices is quite good but that really doesn't solve the problem of how such a small screen and if we go into landscape nothing is going to happen so let's try this is a test so that didn't work out too well let me try again this time I'll type something else and try to be a little bit more precise I'll say today is Monday so slightly better results there not too much better let's actually use the t9 pad sort of as it was intended I don't use t9 too much but I did back in the day and so let's see how it works so I'm gonna say today is Monday today is I'm not looking at the screen Monday see how it did today's today okay that didn't make sense let me do one more thing I'm going to do this is a test let's see if it works the t9 pad has generally good feel it doesn't feel mushy or anything it has a nice bit of feedback so if you are good at t9 you probably won't have a problem entering text into the ACR B touch e two hundred but if you're not a fan of you know this sort of keyboard then you may want to stay away from this device so that was just a look at the keyboard and finally a few notes on performance battery life and call quality so in terms of performance as you saw jumping from screen to screen the be touchy 200 is kind of laggy there is a delay when you go to open certain things like here we're trying to open up Internet Explorer and the screen loads 3 for about 3 or 4 seconds whereas a lot of newer windows mobile hardware is just instant especially with that Qualcomm Snapdragon processor in terms of battery life you'll get through about a day and a half using the B touch you 200 with moderate use with heavy use you'll get through the whole day and with light use you'll probably get two or three days of use out of this device in terms of call quality I found call quality to be quite good the speakerphone did this stored at high volumes but that's really a problem that we see with a lot of phones these days it seems so overall the Easter beat touch e two hundred is undoubtedly a budget device if you're looking for something that's very basic that will make calls that can do email and that does it with a nice slider design then you'll be happy with the the beat 200 that said if you want something that's fast if you want something that's flashy with really good build quality perhaps you want to look elsewhere but if you do want one they're shipping over at Clover co uk like i said for about three hundred and fifty dollars unlocked that is it for now for the acer be touch e two hundred