Acer‘s attempt to muscle in on the fast-growing smartphones market can be described as a strategy of offering a cornucopia of choices to the consumer, if one was being charitable.
Unlike Apple, which laboured over perfecting one product – the iPhone – when it made its move into the nascent smartphone market, the world’s third-biggest PC maker yesterday launched four phone models in one go in Taiwan, and promised six more by the end of the year.
The idea, as Aymar de Lencquesaing, head of Acer’s smart handheld group and former Packard Bell chief executive, explained, was that Acer’s research showed smartphone users were clearly segmented into different categories, and so different phones had to be made for different folks.
Those less charitable, however, may instead say Acer is simply throwing everything it has at the consumer just to see what sticks.
It’s not that there aren’t a few promising new innovations in the four phones. The M900 (pictured), designed for professional business users, has a fingerprint sensor for security authentication. The DX900 can fit two sim cards so you don’t need two phones even if you have two mobile phone accounts.
It’s just that, with the exception of the clearly business-minded M900, none of the other phones feel particularly specialised. They all have a 3.2 megapixel camera, they all run on the standard Windows Mobile operating system, and they are all roughly the same size (that is, just slightly too big to fit comfortably in one’s palm).
They also all suffer from some curious design choices, such as a proliferation of small buttons on the sides and front that would be convenient shortcuts only after you painstakingly memorise what each one does. Acer tried to put its stamp onto the phones with a proprietary interface that transforms the usual icons into items in a virtual office – you press on an actual envelope to access email, or a CD to listen to music. This would be fine had the ‘office’ fit on one screen. It fits across three instead, with the result being an interface that only gives access to three or four icons at a time.
Acer, who is clearly planning to be in this business for the long term, may be hoping that consumers would overlook these initial quirks in favour of the low price of the phones. Acer’s current phones undercut the iPhone in Taiwan by around NT$10000, or by nearly a third of the iPhone’s price. Over time, few doubt that the Taiwanese computing giant will be able to put the research and development resources to bear to make the necessary improvements.
For now, however, consumers would do well to bear in mind that in smartphones, as in much else in life, you get what you pay for.
