Acer neoTouch S200

This smartphone is fast with a large high-res screen

Unpacking the product, we found a device with a high gloss black body the panels of which were fingerprint magnets. The neoTouch S200 has a 3.8 inch WVGA TFT display (480 x 800 pixels). It sports the fastest mobile processor available today, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 1 GHz, and runs Windows 6.5 Professional with widgets for Facebook, Youtube, Blogger, Flickr etc. The built-in GPS worked like a charm and gave us the exact location of the mobile using Google Maps. The neoTouch offers a small amount of storage—206 MB to be precise, which is barely sufficient. We expected a minimum of 8 GB flash memory as this has become a standard in high-end phones. Acer backed the absence of high capacity flash memory saying that this was done with the aim of allowing users to choose their own capacity (it supports up to 32 GB).

While the device supports GPRS/EDGE and 3G, the Windows Marketplace app requires Wi-Fi to work. The Marketplace offers you a plethora of free and paid applications.

The touch interface could have been smoother and the IE Mobile Web browsing experience was just average. It took a while to figure out the zoom bar and zooming in and out took quite a bit of doing. Double taps would have been more comfortable. The IE Mobile browser does automatically rotate pages thanks to the built-in accelerometer, but if you type in portrait mode and want to flip to landscape mode, the keyboard hides itself automatically, which is quite annoying.

Although the phone has a 5-megapixel auto focus camera with advanced settings such as tuning of ISO, stabilizer [with a max resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels], the photo quality turned out to be rather dampening. Even with the LED flash it barely makes a difference in low-light conditions. Acer did not include any music or video player unlike in other phones and left the users with the embedded Windows Media player which does not support a graphics equalizer. The neoTouch FM radio, however, had a good interface and offered memory for 20 radio stations and the sound quality was decent.

Call quality was excellent and the dial-pad is nicely spaced making it easier to dial phone numbers. However, the signal strength was poor in many places, which explained the poor battery life [without switching on Wi-Fi]. The battery drained after just 50 odd minutes of talk time and 80 minutes of browsing after a full battery charge.

There is a hardware lock key on the left hand side of the device and the volume rocker, reset punch-hole and the camera shutter key are on the right. The remaining features are typical of Windows Mobile devices such as call/contact manager, Office Mobile, multi-media management etc.

Verdict	It's a touchscreen phone with a fast processor and a large high-res screen but that's about it
Pros	Qualcomm Snapdragon 1 GHz processor Large screen size 3.8" 65K-color resistive TFT touchscreen, WVGA 480 x 800 pixels Built-in GPS and Google Maps with social networking features Good call quality
Cons	No flash memory for storage Poor photo and video quality; no camera lens cover High-gloss body panels are fingerprint magnets Low ringing volume

—Akhtar Pasha