Acer Tempo M900 with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional

Let's take a look at the Settings on the M900.

Unlike the Touch Pro2, the M900 gives you a lot of hardware buttons to customize--up to five!

This is the utility for the fingerprint scanner. You must swipe your finger to change the settings. The biometrics pad worked well and required only one swipe most of the time.

You can use the fingerprint security in several places: when the device comes out of standby, when you access your private folder, and when you try to enter your PIM data.

As alluded to above, you can have a special private folder on your device that can only be accessed by swiping your finger.

Enrolling just takes four swipes and is a painless process.

You can also customize the function of the soft keys on the Today screen or in Acer Shell, which is helpful.

Here we are in System.

From here, you have three choices of how the backlight should be regulated: by idle time, light conditions, and battery level. I left all of them unchecked. Typically I'd prefer the backlight to be set by lighting conditions, but the light sensor polling frequency of the M900 is far too high, which caused rapid fluctuations in the backlighting.

Wow - and just with a few programs running (ActiveSync, Messaging), we only have 28MB of RAM available! That's not good.

You can actually use the biometric sensor as a navigation device. Here there are the five settings you can choose, including an on-screen mouse cursor. Sadly, all of these options don't work very well...even with sensitivity adjustments, it's hard to get them to work smoothly and reliably.

This video shows some software features that we've written about so far in this review.

CAMERA

After some tweaking in the settings, the M900 produces some very nice images thanks to the autofocus. This macro came out clear with great color reproduction.

Here is another macro shot that came out well.

On a landscape-type shot, the M900 didn't do well at reproducing the vibrant greens of the grass and trees.

And even though the M900 has a flash, interior shots come out noisy with a milky film.

The M900 can do VGA video recording. Click here to see a sample in 3GP format. The M900 doesn't allow for video recording in any other format.

Click on to the next page as we wrap up the review with speed benchmark, notes on battery life, and Pros and Cons for the Acer M900.