Acer rolls out three touchscreen handsets in India
MUMBAI: Along with Nokia, Samsung and LG, Acer has joined the bandwagon of cheap touch screen handsets with the launch of three handsets in the Indian market including beTouch e101, beTouch e200 in the lower and mid-segment and neoTouch in the premier segment.
The company has tied up with Tata Docomo to offer initial buyers free download data of 500MB per month for the first six months.
The lowest end of the new series is the beTouch e101, which comes with a 3.2-inch resistive touchscreen TFT (65K colours, 240x320 pixels), complete with a scroll wheel under it for easier navigation. Running on Windows Mobile 6.5, the device comes equipped with a 2-megapixel camera (albeit without flash or autofocus), 256MB RAM, 512MB ROM (expandable via microSD), and the complete Pocket Office suite. Since the handset doesn't have 3G or Wi-Fi, EDGE and Bluetooth will have to suffice for connectivity. The 1140mAh battery claims to last for 5 hours of talk-time with 400 hours of standby time. The Acer beTouch e101 retails at Rs. 11,900.
beTouch e200, which sports a smaller 3-inch touchscreen (65k colours, 240x400 pixels), and comes with a 3.15-megapixel camera. The screen also slides up to reveal a full numeric keypad, which can be quite handy for those who do a lot of text messaging.
Apart from adding 3G and Wi-Fi to the mix, the beTouch e200 does not vary in features from the features of the beTouch e200, and is priced at Rs. 17,900.
Acer has also launched its premium mobile handset in India, the neoTouch. The handset sports 1GHz Snapdragon processor that powers the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. Additionally, Acer has overlaid the operating system with its customised Acer UI 3.0 for easy touch-based navigation. And all that can be used on the large 3.8-inch resistive touchscreen (65K colours, 480x800 pixels), which comes complete with an accelerometer for auto-rotation, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor.
The neoTouch packs a 3.5mm headphone jack and stereo FM radio support to keep music aficionados happy, while pleasing the shutterbugs with a 5-megapixel camera (with autofocus, LED flash, geo-tagging and VGA video recording). Filled with all the connectivity options that the users would need and enough software add-ons for work and social networking, neoTouch is available for Rs. 35,000.
