Acer Tempo M900 review

Acer announced its new range of smartphones to great fanfare earlier in the year, but the products have been slow in trickling out. Our first glimpse came in the form of the deeply-unimpressive dual-SIM Acer DX900, and we now have the more mainstream Tempo M900 in our hands.

It makes quite a first impression, but not necessarily in a good way. The M900 is one of the largest and heaviest smartphones we've reviewed, not just recently, but ever; it weighs an elephantine 188g and measures 19mm at its thickest point - that's not to mention its 62mm girth and 119mm length. This is one phone you won't enjoy having in your pocket.

It's similar in size to the massive HTC Touch Pro2, but where that phone's curves and fantastic usability made up for its pocket-stretching size, the M900 struggles to justify its heft. The screen, for instance, is impressively large, at 3.8in in diagonal and boasts the same 480 x 800 resolution as the Touch Pro2. But it's neither as bright, nor as sensitive. We found ourselves having to jab the screen repeatedly, just to get it to launch apps and to navigate between the various menu screens.

Underneath the screen is a sliding, full Qwerty keyboard, but again it's nowhere near as successful as the Touch Pro2's. The keys are angled up to make them easier to hit, and it feels as if it should be easy to type on, but the key travel is indistinct and unpleasant under the thumbs, and we found we couldn't type quickly without making errors. There's no tilt on the screen as you get with the Touch Pro2, so if you want to type away on a desk or table, you'll have to hunch over the phone to see what you're doing.

So far, so average, but the mediocrity just keeps coming. Acer has also attempted to rival HTC's Windows Mobile overlay, but instead of simply making core functions easier to operate with a finger, it's created a laughably simplistic desktop metaphor. So you get graphic of a physical desk, adorned with an envelope indicating how many unread emails you have; a piece of paper with a number on it telling you how many text messages you have; a phone standing on end showing missed calls; and a flip calendar with the date and time (but not the content) of your next appointment. It looks daft, communicates little of use and adds little to the phone's usability.

The M900 can count one area where it edges in front of its rival - a fingerprint reader, which allows the phone to be locked and unlocked with a simple finger-swipe, and also offers five-way (up, down, left, right and select) touch-sensitive navigation. But it's an opportunity lost; it doesn't seem to like bright conditions. We spent about 15 minutes swiping over and over again in the street until we figured this out, shielded the reader under one hand and instantly gained access. And it's far from the most practical means of navigating Windows Mobile's fiddly interface.

All of this is a shame because underneath the bizarre front end, unresponsive touchscreen and chunky exterior, the M900 has everything a top end smartphone should have. It has HSDPA for super-fast data downloads and browsing, it has an FM Radio, plus an accelerometer that switches the screen orientation around automatically, and a five-megapixel camera on the rear with an LED flash.

Even battery life is halfway decent. The M900 has a 1,530mAh capacity lithium polymer battery, which is pretty capacious, and in our light use tests it fared well. We managed to extract two days, 19hrs 25mins out of it, which while not quite up there with the likes of the iPhone and Touch Pro2, is respectable.