Acer Tempo M900 with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional

Acer has build its own interface on top of Windows Mobile called Acer Shell. It is comprise of three "3D desktop" screens. Many items on the desktop are linked to certain applications: the window goes to weather, the calendar goes to calendar, the envelope goes to email, the message ledger goes to SMS, the device goes to call history, and the time goes to alarm settings.

If you slide open the keyboard, you won't get a landscape view of Acer Shell, but this row of icons.

If you tap on the email icon, you will get a TouchFLO 3D-like display of emails. You can flick your finger to see previews of your messages, or tap on a message to read it.

The SMS link takes you to a similar screen where you can preview or view your SMS.

From here, you can add multiple cities so that you can keep track of the time zone in various places.

If you tap on the Window in Acer Shell on the 3D desktop, you are taken to this display which shows you weather in the cities that you've added.

If we swipe right we are taken to the next section of the desktop. The rolodex will take you to favorite contacts, the picture frame takes you to photos, and the music holder takes you to the media player.

In photos, we get a TouchFLO 3D-like display of photos stored on the device. You can flick your finger up or down to change the picture.

...and tapping on an image will take you to the Acer photo gallery where you can take further action, such as MMS the image, email it, delete it, etc.

Here is the favorite people application. You can easily add a contact, and, if the person has a picture associated to their contact entry, it will display here.

And this is the media player which will show you album art on any music stored on your device.

And finally, on the right-most panel, we have a tool bin for system functions, a globe for internet favorites, and a switchboard for programs.

Tapping on the switchboard will bring up an HTC-like program launcher which you can customize.

Clicking the tool bin gives you quick access to sound profiles, backlight settings, etc.

And tapping on the globe displays this ugly list of internet favorites. Yuck!

SOFTWARE

The Acer Shell interface takes up a massive 20MB of program RAM. Considering that will leave you with just 22MB of free RAM, it may be a good idea to shut it off and go back to the default Windows Mobile Today screen.

Tapping on the icon in the upper right corner will bring up a task manager. It looks like I'm running low on RAM with just five programs open!

The M900 comes loaded with Office Mobile.

And though the M900 has a slide out keyboard, you'll be happy to know that the on screen keyboard is actually quite good.

And it becomes even better in landscape.

So lets take a look in the Programs folder. As you can see, the M900 comes with Voice Commander to control your device via voice, but it's not as good as Microsoft Voice Command.

Inside the multimedia folder, we have the Acer album for photos, Camera, FM tuner, Namecard manager for OCR, and streaming player for watching streaming internet video.

Here is the FM radio application. You'll need to plug in a headset to get reception.

The namecard manager is something we've seen before. It allows you to take a picture of a business card or text, and have it convert to digital text. It works only if you take a perfect picture of the text that you want to convert.

In the Utilities, there are several items: you can re-install Acer programs with App Recovery, the Backup Utility is a simple backup program, Default Settings will hard reset, GPSViewer will let you see which satellites you're linked to, Memory Optimizer will automatically soft reset your device to clear RAM, Satellite Data Update is the aGPS program, and Task Manger, is, well, a task manager.

Because the M900 has such a low amount of program memory, it may be a good idea to have the device automatically reset to clear out RAM.

I immediately downloaded the Skyfire web browser on the M900, which worked great on the WVGA screen.

The M900 doesn't come with a video player good enough to play a huge array of file formats. But after loading on CorePlayer, I was able to play an HD episode of The Office. Video playback was actually a bit choppy compared to the Touch Pro2, and there was even some pixelization during high-motion scenes.

PHONE

The Call History tab on the M900 has been spruced up a bit.

When you are on a call with someone, this is what it looks like. You don't get a large photo caller ID image like you do on the Touch Pro2.

You might have noticed a "speed dial" button on the left soft key on the Today screen. This is where it takes you. From here, you can go to a useful Frequency Dial screen that lists callers by the ones you dial the most.

And here is the on-screen dialer, which features finger-friendly buttons.

Click onto the next page of the review where we'll cover photo and video quality, plus system settings.