Acer X960 Windows Mobile smartphone is one of these devices, and we’ve got hold of one to put it through its paces. Read on to find out what we think of the X960 in this hands-on review.
Acer X960 isn’t the smallest At 106mm x 59mm x 14mm (4.2in x 2.3in x .6in) phone on the market, but is still easy to throw in a pocket. The front features a 2.8″ resistive touchscreen(INFO), which is capable of showing 65,000 colors at VGA (640 x 480 pixel) resolution. Sunlight legibility isn’t the best, due to a reflective covering over the display. The rest of the front is clad in shiny black plastic that likes to show up finger prints, as does the display. Above the display is the ear piece, a forward facing camera, an ambient light sensor, and a few different colored notification LEDs.
Acer X960 was fairly average, with a little hiss in both directions. The X960′s 1530MAh battery gave below average performance for its capacity, only lasting between 1-2 days of light use in our tests. Reception seemed fairly average, with no calls being dropped and a HSDPA signal being often available. Being a Windows Mobile 6.1 device, the X960′s contacts application was very robust, with plenty of room for various data.
Acer X960 was poor, as you’d expect from a Windows Mobile Professional device. However, it is possible to adjust the ringer volume and switch the phone to silent or vibrate mode via the volume rocker. A speakerphone is included and worked quite well, but wasn’t especially loud. Unfortunately, the X960 doesn’t support voice dialing. However, speed dialing is included, and the phone offers a neat panel interface for this purpose.
Acer X960 has a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with an LED flash and dedicated shutter button. The camera can also be used for videos, but we were left unimpressed by both its photo and video capabilities. Finding the videos afterwards wasn’t too difficult, thanks to a Gallery shortcut from the ‘Acer Shell’ home screen.
Web browsing was sometimes usable, but with only Internet Explorer Mobile 6 pre-loaded I found it often totally unusable, either because I was given an error for every page I tried to load, or content rich pages (such as the MobileBurn desktop page) caused the phone to slow to an unusable crawl. Overall I was very unimpressed with the web browser, although alternatives such as Opera are available to improve the X960′s capabilities. Being a smartphone, the Acer X960 packs a music player to keep users entertained, but it lacks a proper 3.5mm headphone port, which is a shame. Bluetooth A2DP is featured though, so stereo Bluetooth headphones can be used instead. Videos can also be played via the Windows Media Player Mobile app.
Acer X960′s user interface was a standard Windows mobile 6.1 affair, but Acer have, to their credit, tried to spice things up a bit with a few extras here and there. For example, the ‘Today’ home screen can be replaced with Acer’s ‘Acer Shell’ interface, that gives you a virtual office on your phone. From here you can look around the office and select from a number of graphic shortcuts, such as tapping on the flip calendar to access the calendar app. The nice thing about these shortcuts is that some of them provide live data,