Acer targets top five position for smartphone business

SINGAPORE--Acer made its intentions clear when it bought Windows Mobile phone maker E-Ten last year and thereafter setting up a division called the Smart Handheld Business Group. At a media event for the Asia launch of its new products, Roger Yuen, vice president of Acer's Smart Handheld Business Group for Asia Pacific, outlined the company's bold ambition of becoming "one of the top five players in the smart handheld market" globally in three years. According to IDC, the top five companies by market share for smartphones shipped globally in 2008, in descending order, were Nokia, RIM, Apple, Motorola and HTC.

The DX650 smartphone has a touchscreen display on one side and a smaller OLED screen with a numeric keypad on the other.

Acer's first batch of smartphones were announced back in February during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) held in Barcelona. Four devices were highlighted at the time and some are already commercially available in Europe. Today, the company officially launched these products in Asia. They will all be available in the first half of this year along with an entry-level device, the DX650. Here's a list of the five products, all of which run Windows Mobile 6.1:

• DX900 (S$799/US$530, now out)--A dual-SIM device with HSDPA connectivity, this was first announced by E-Ten last year and is now rebranded Acer with the same model number.
• DX650 (S$599/US$397, now out)--This wasn't highlighted at MWC and is a dual-face smartphone without 3G capabilities.
• X960 (S$699/US$464, available by June)--An HSDPA smartphone with a 2.8-inch VGA display.
• F900 (TBC, available by June)--A High-end handheld with a 3.8-inch WVGA screen similar to what's on the HTC Touch HD.
• M900 (TBC, available by June)--Similar to the F900, this comes with an additional slide-out keyboard and fingerprint sensor.

The two high-end smartphones, the F900 and M900, also come with Acer's own custom interface. This replaces the standard WM Home screen with a graphical interface that looks like a physical work desk. Icons which bring you to their respective applications look like their real-world equivalents. For example, tapping on the CD rack on this "desk" will launch the handheld's media player for music playback. This is not available on the other three devices but they do come with Spb's Mobile Shell addon interface instead.

The tweaking of the user interface is in line with one of its objectives--to make smartphones more user-friendly. The company also said it plans to make a range of products that will cater to different segments. The M900, for example, will target those who need a technologically advanced smartphone to connect to the Internet constantly. Future plans include strategies to make its devices more appealing to the design-conscious crowd. To that end, the company also talked briefly about some of its upcoming products for the second-half of 2009. Learn more about those smartphones here.