Posted by admin in Uncategorized on 06 22nd, 2009 | When Acer bought Taiwanese mobile manufacturer E-TEN in 2008 we expected great things.
E-TEN’s Glofiish phones were among the more attractively-designed Windows Mobile handsets around, so with the acquisition of the company by Acer last year, a whole new realm of possibilities seemed to be on the horizon. However, the Windows Mobile-based Acer DX900, the first offspring of this marriage, offers a false dawn.
The phone doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. It’s short, squat and dumpy, measuring 17mm across its middle, which is extremely thick and seems out of place in this generation of slim phones.
However, its key strength is a true novelty: operation of dual SIMs, a feature that no other smartphone in the world offers. This means you can make and take calls on two numbers with the same handset. You can insert a 3.5G SIM card in the first one, which allows you to connect at speeds of up to 7.2Mbits/sec. With the second, the data speed is limited to GPRS rates.
Unfortunately, the implementation of this feature is less than top-drawer, the naming of the SIMs as mere, ‘1 a 2’, may cause confusion when dialing or sending texts. It’s even worse for data transfer though: you have to set up a separate modem connection for each one, and use Windows Mobile’s Connection Settings to switch between the two.
Another first is the use of Internet Explorer Mobile 6, which allows proper, full web page rendering to Windows Mobile. The array of features also includes Bluetooth, 802.11bg Wi-Fi, microSD memory card slot, GPS, an accelerometer that flips the screen from portrait to landscape automatically, and a three-megapixel camera with autofocus, LED flash and video capture.
There are some drawbacks though; including a weak battery and an unresponsive 480×640 touch screen.
On the whole, the dual SIM capability is novel and could be attractive to those who don’t want to carry two mobiles, but it’s not handled very elegantly and the rest of the package just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It retails for £374.
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