Acer unveils Android phones

This is the Taiwanese PC maker’s first dig at the smartphone market, having once been a player in the old PDA market earlier in the decade.

The five new Acer smartphones range from $499 up to $999 and go on sale at the end of the month. They are likely to be carried by at least five mass retailers, although none have yet been named.

Acer product group general manager Nigel Gore said Acer was initially aiming at the chunk of the smartphone market sold outright without a telco plan – estimated at about 20 per cent.

The aim is to garner about 3 per cent of that market segment by the end of the year and 10 per cent within 12 months.

Mr Gore acknowledged telco partners were hard to woo at the moment amongst a market crowded with many different types of smartphones such as the Apple iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry range and a horde of Google Android powered phones from a host of manufacturers.

There two bottom end Acer smartphones, the $399 touch screen only beTouch E120 and the touch and hard keyboard equipped $499 beTouch 130 run the old Android 1.6 OS and feature low grunt 416 Mhz processors and 3.2 megapixel cameras. The beTouch E130 is designed to woo punters away from the BlackBerry.

Acer expects the $699 Liquid E touch screen phone to be its volume seller. This has the speedy Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, although on Acer machines it's clocked down from 1Ghz to 768Mhz to preserve battery life. The 3.5 inch screen is capacitive touch and WVGA resolution with Android 2.1 and a five megapixel camera capable of shooting VGA video. The $999 Ferrari Liquid E adds Ferrari livery and a Bluetooth headset embossed with the famous dancing hooves logo.

The $799 Acer Stream is the multimedia special and sports a 1Ghz Snapdragon, 3.7 inch capacitive AMOLED screen, Android 2.1, a five megapixel camera capable of shooting 720p HD video and an HDMI port.