Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is a software tour of the acer neo touch s200 which has a 1 gigahertz snapdragon processor running on windows mobile 6.5 so you're really going to get a feel for how fast those devices once we kind of run through going through some programs so let's turn on the device and right away you can see acer's home screen which is basically a simple program launcher a simple icon launcher and these six icons can be changed and quite simply you tap on something and it opens or you can tap on the gear in the bottom right corner to change any of the shortcuts so we tap on one of them go to change the shortcut and we can substitute another icon and press the check mark when you're done very simple it doesn't have much utility because you can't see your next appointment you can't see the weather it's just a program launcher but on the other hand it's very simple and it probably doesn't use as much battery life as a lot of the 3d interfaces you see out there the spinning cubes and the rotating screens and all those things that look nice but actually use up a lot of battery life so the minimal design is appreciated the button to the left is actually a button that launches the start menu which is actually a nice touch because it helps with one-handed usability when you're walking down the street you don't have to take out your other hand to hold up the device to tap up here you can just use your thumb to quickly access the start menu and flick through and then the button to the left of that is the lock button for Windows Mobile which will just take you into the standard lock screen that we've seen before okay so let's draw into the start menu a little bit see what we have some of these things I've added such as opera mobile beta skyfire it doesn't come with another browser to use such as opera mobile which is unfortunate because even if you install opera mobile 9.5 which is free you don't get the accelerometer support so turning the device over the landscape won't flip the screen over so let's take a look at what we have there's a program called agenda which is actually a calendar program that works quite nicely so it's quite simply a calendar we can click on any day and see what's going on that day we can tap on it to get an extended view and then we can press the + button to add a new appointment and we're taken into a nicer looking finger friendly interface to enter in a new appointment you can still get to the standard windows mobile calendar but I think this is a nicer change to what we're used to so let's close that go back into the start menu here are something social networking which is really just a portal to four different social networks so we can go into the facebook application which is just the standard windows mobile facebook application we can go into the youtube program and we're going to show that in a sec you can log in with blogger you can log in with Flickr and that's that's pretty much the extent of the social network program it's really just a launcher to get you into the various programs go back in the start menu of course we have the marketplace multimedia let's see what's in there we have album which is a thurs HTC like album to access your pictures okay so we can take a look at the gallery we can click on a picture accelerometer works in this screen we can flip to the right although not as smooth as an HTC device it's probably just a software issue then we tap on the screen and go back and we can get it back into portrait pretty fast screen rotation speed and let's go back into that screen that we were in multimedia so we was streaming players so that we can access streaming video content we've camera and we have an FM tuner and of course you need your head set connected to get that to work and there's the FM tuner okay let's go back in see what else we have if we go into preferences we can change some system settings different than what you get in the standard settings menu so we can go to wallpaper for example and change the wallpaper of the background that you see in the icon launcher on the main screen so we can go to let's say this purple one and click ok and here is the wallpaper that has been applied very nice let's go back in the start menu see what else we have here microsoft myphone you get some widgets that are common windows mobile 6.5 like ms and weather and msn money office mobile and let's take a look at the on-screen keyboard let's go into word mobile and I'm going to start a new document and if you've used windows mobile before you know how long this takes watch how fast it is on the Snapdragon extremely fast about one second we're usually it's about three four or five seconds on other devices so the keyboard is okay it's pretty good let's do it let's do a little test here it does have word correction although there's no way to really turn that off unfortunately let's take a look at the landscape keyboard a nice wide landscape keyboard there's not tactile feedback like you get on some HTC devices but I think with some practice it's a it'll turn out to be a pretty good keyboard up there with those from HTC acer's keyboards in the past haven't been too good but this one has a nice layout large buttons you get the hover like you have on the iPhone and HTC devices and the word suggestions are usually pretty good let's go to utilities see what we have there getting started search phone this is all standard windows mobile stuff memory optimization this is a sign of low quality software look at this acer has been using this memory optimization tool and all of its devices and there's still this comma in the wrong place why don't they change that it must be a simple fix but perhaps not there's a very low quality piece of software that I wish acer would finally update basically it allows your device to automatically reset itself on a regular basis to clear up the memory a pretty good idea but the interface is very ugly for that program so let's go back into utilities and this kind of points out one of the flaws of windows mobile 6.5 the program launcher doesn't stay open so I'm continually having to go back but that's not an issue with this device it's with windows mobile 6.5 in general and then we have a simple backup utility that allow you to backup and restore your phone just to make sure that you have everything backed up now let's take a look some of the system settings so let's go into system and let's see much memory we have right now so right now about 100 mega it's free we've got about two or three programs open it's pretty good it's not as good as say an HTC touch pro2 or touch HD but it's plenty of program memory to work with okay let's see what else we have a utility for a gps a program that lets you have magnified icons in the title bar and so if i tap up here i go to the Wi-Fi manager or the communications manager and that just happened because I tapped on where it says h4 hsdpa and yes I'm in the US on AT&T getting hsdpa because in my area they have the UMTS 1900 band which is really great if we go into backlights points out another problem if you have it automatically adjusts the backlight by light sensor look how sensitive it is the polling frequency is way too high so you'll get the backlight switching brightnesses on a regular basis whereas on an HTC device or a samsung device the pulling frequency is lot lower so that you get a smoother transition also they have this setting which doesn't make sense all do detect back backlight by battery level so the idea here is that you if you have a full battery you'll be at full brightness as you go down to sixty percent fifty percent forty percent battery your brightness will follow which just doesn't make sense to me so I really just leave the brightness on a constant sort of right in the center and click out of that and finally let's take a look at that YouTube application that's built in it's all the way down here at the bottom so we can go to the top rated videos wherever hsdpa right now and what we can do is flick through a picture or flick through the thumbnails and if we find one we like and tap on it we get this nice little animation and then the thumbnail goes full screens is buffering and video playback is very smooth so overall the software on the acer neo touch s200 is pretty minimal which is good considering the easter devices of the past had so much software and bloatware that at the end of the day there was a very small amount of program memory left the Snapdragon processor absolutely makes things a lot faster flipping through various screens and in day-to-day usage it feels like a very fast and snappy device we're going to leave it up to the benchmarks to see exactly how fast this is we're going to do some tests with video performance and that sort of thing be sure to check pocketnow.com for the full review the full wrap up of the acer neo touch and if you're looking for an acer neo touch s200 of your own to buy but now shipping at clove coat UK for only about five hundred dollars and those of you in the market for an unlocked smartphone know that that's a pretty good price for device that has such a cutting-edge processor included so that's it for now