Acer beTouch E101 - Smart Phone Review

Dimensions 113 x 56 x 12.8mm
Manufactured Nov 2009
MRP INR 12,700
Processor Speed 1 GHz
Weight 118gm
Touch Screen 3.2 inches TFT
OS Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional
CPU Qualcomm MSM 7225 528 MHz processor

I have won Windows Mobile 6.5 Acer E101 in South Asia MVP open day Summit contest. I started using this smart phone just wanted to share the review with all of you. You can get this in eBay for Rs 9999 with one year warranty support. Slim, beautiful look and feel is excellent and esthetics is awesome. One of the good options I like is call recording facility.

Acer be Touch E101 comes with a 3.2-inch WQVGA touch display, 2-megapixel camera and A-GPS. There is slot for external memory card support. We can charge battery of the smart phone from USB, flexible to recharge in the car. There is option for MicroSoft office availability from smart phone. Flexibility of Touch scroll wheel a good option to navigate and switch for options. The sound and music qualities are good.


Areas to Improve
1.The caller voice suddenly becomes slow down when another call comes i.e. for call waiting.
2.To reach the call from phone to blue tooth headset its taking 5-7 seconds.
3.The option to update the phonebook with new number or storing multiple numbers for same contact is not user friendly. It’s really annoying to save it as new contact option or edit existing contact to store the contact name’s another number. There is no option to assigning different number to existing contact directly when a call received from existing contacts another new number.


4.There is short cut option to close all processes today screen or main screen to improve performance of the smart phone. But it would have been good if they can kill the processes as and when we close them, Similar to how it happens in desktop or laptop out of the box. I am not sure why this option is not improved from windows mobile 3.1.
5.There is no WIFI support and FM Radio in this smart phone.
6.It would have been good if they would have made the caller photo in the contacts much bigger than current size. I feel that the screen is bigger but the picture of the caller is displaying very very small. They would have made use of the entire space instead of showing picture only in the corner.
7.After receiving call and having conversation, mute button accidentally touches to ear and it‘s really annoying the other call will not hear the voice.
8.Sent SMS text messages are stored in inbox even though there is sent items folder. It would have been good if they can store in sent items.The battery life disappoints me, even though no multimedia stuff is used, it’s not up to the user manual instructions.
9.It would have been good if the PDF and flash software comes in built.
10.Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 does not support managing SMS messages from computer.

I have used windows mobile 3.1 in the year 2003. Since then, I didn’t find any improvement in performance in the next versions of windows mobile. As the proverb says “something that is beautiful, don’t function perfect and something that is work perfectly will not be beautiful”. It applies to the product, though it’s having good looking User Interface, performance wise not that much impressive. Video recording and pictures quality is good but not extra ordinary.

Finally I can conclude that ACER E101 is not too impressive even though looks eye-catching, sadly when you try to use it lack of many user friendly features are missing. It definitely better than the previous versions of windows mobile, but I can say that my over all experience is O.K. I can give average rating for the overall product.

Days pass ....Only memories Cherish

What is an MVP?

Last week, I have attended ASIA Pacific MVP OpenDay 2010 at Microsoft IDC. It happened from 20th January to 23rd January. I have not overcome that MVP hangver yet. I couldn’t attend last year MVP Summit that happened on Nov 2008. This time I was able to make it no matter how busy am I. No doubt it’s enthralling experience to meet all techie experts, build contacts and relationships with him. I checked in the hotel ISTA on 20th January and the event started, with the IT PRO round table by Ravi Sankar. He shared some of the interesting stuff of providing more details to Indian Communities, use of Technet.in and also noted feedback from MVPs, what we are expecting and being community leader, feedback from communities. The next round table was Developer Round table by Stuti Shukla. This is more interactive and intresting session where she divided us into 5 groups and gave 3 topics and asked to present on any one of the topic.

The topics are
1. Top5 Challenges faced by individual developers & How Microsoft should address them
2. How Microsoft most effectively address Application Development needs of the small and medium organizations in India.
3. Winning Microsoft against Open Source in the web application space.

Where I got the chance to meet new friends these are my team members Vic, Subhodh, Abhishek Joshi, Gaurav, Neeraj Bhatt and Amit Bansal. We have chosen the first topic. We were able to coordinate well and present top 5 points out of so many we figured in the 15 minutes time frame given to us. No doubt every team presented the best. But out our team we won the first prize. Hope Microsoft got valuable feedback from MVPs that would be really useful once it’s implemented. Finally the Day 1 evening ended with fun games where we were asked to construct a bridge with some logics and rules. Then we have 'graveyard' sessions in the night where these sessions are optional to attend. We were discussing all the useful and general stuff.

Day2 – Highlights
After the busy day and staying late nights, we were like rushing to go to Microsoft IDC. Soon after the windows 7 round table, we reached MS IDC from ISTA for Srini Koppulu’s Key note. He spoke about various new releases of Microsoft projects, sales and services on Microsoft new Products likewin7,Bing, Xbox, MS Office, Unified communications, Exchange server, SqlServer 2008. MVPs from other counties and states are much impressed with MS campus and buildings; they feel that it resembles Redmond Microsoft campus. He patiently answered all of our questions.

This was my question?
Bing is a serious challenger to Google. No doubt in it. But it don’t over come Google the market?, what are the key focus areas you are going to improve in terms of making bing equally competent enough with Google. For this Srini answered that presently they are working on that issue as concentrating U.S. Market and after some time it will spread Indian market too.


Abhishek Kanth(MVP Lead), Hima Vejella (.NET RockStar), Srini Koppula (Microsoft IDC Founder), Vijay K. Malhotra(Localization Expert), AnandKhanse(Windows Club)

Then we had a quick group photo and jumped into Technical sessions. I attend session on AppFabric Caching by Abid, It was good , followed by Lisa Feigenbaum session on Visual 2010. She showed twitter analyzer demo that is awesome. Next I had long chat and discussion with Lisa on VS2010 product feedback that is really good. She has taken the feedback given by us. Then we have gone to Golkonda Fort for a tour, our ancient fort. After that dinner, ramp up and the day was over.

ASP.NET & C# MVPs giving Feedback to LISA

We have Office 2010 round table, followed by Rajiv’s Key note, technical sessions and product team round tables. This is one of the things I like and feel that it’s useful. We had nice chalk talk with VS 2010 product team and gave direct feedback to them on the product. Then we had one media ready session though I didn’t understand the session objective. I was expecting more from this session like things to know how to write for our favorite magazine? We had party at the night, followed by dinner.

Day4 - Comes to end
Not known how it has ended. Such a great tech event. We too had sessions on this day. We had videos and demos too. Below pic shows my video presenting to all MVPS.

Hima Vejella's MVP Video presenting to all MVPs

I just left before the lunch as I need to prepare for Community Tech Days(CTD). When I went to CTD I came to know that I won Windows mobile 6.5 as the 2nd highest grabbing Karma Points.

Some of the general discussions we had
1. Why people are working constantly with computer? When sessions are going .It happens in U.S. too.
Most of the MVPs have their own businesses and they are business man. So every one minute is valuable for them. We can do multitasking. It’s not that we are insulting speaker. It’s all geeky culture, where you see people constantly working on their laptops even while going to cafeteria.
2. Why people are thinking Email as instant messenger and want to reply the moment they see an Email? And expect the email reply as same.
May be we are habituated to it.
MVP – MVP?
Not everyone can become it. If you can dream it, you can become it. If you can think it you can achieve it. You will not get opportunities around you .You have to find opportunities.
How do people get time to blog?
It’s not they get time. They are finding time .Where there is a will there is a way. If you have passion and interest you can organize our time.

People who are getting busy they are very busy. People who are idle they are still idle
If you are growing day by day, definitely you will face some political challenges around you. You should also be ready to face them.
You have Bing as default search engine as home page in IE 8, but do you have IE 8 as default browser?

Jacob Sebastian(XML&SQL Expert), Hima Vejella, Minal&Supritim Agarwal(.NET Curry), Vikram, Vijay(MSIGEEK), Pinal(SqlBlogAuthority)
Feedback
Some of the sessions are like very low level 200 sessions. Being MVPS we already know some of the stuff delivered in sessions. We are expecting high quality sessions in near future.
I can say that it’s one of the most memorable and unforgettable event which I am able to meet some of the great people. One thing that makes me happy is I am able to meet the people in the elite community, build contacts and successful relationships with them. We had lot of fun enjoyed each and every minute of the event technically.Hope to see you all soon.

Action Items:
I feel that I am like a web page in MSDN. I am trying to be more Professional,Optimist,Matured and still a lot to learn.

MVP Global Summit 2007

What is an MVP?

More pictures can be seen here

.NET Technology from Hima's Pen