MWC: Acer Launches Iconia Smart Phone

Acer has shown an Android smartphone with a 4.8in screen, at the bottom of its Iconia range of tablets, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

With its big screen, the Iconia Smart is very close to being a tablet, and Acer says it is “100 percent smartphone, 100 tablet”. A long-time notebook maker,Acer has denied reports that it is phasing out netbooks in favour of tablets. The Iconia Smart will be available in the UK from 1 May, according to reports.

Big phone, or small tablet?

The Iconia Smart has a 1024×480 screen resolution, the usual Android Home, Menu, Back and Search hard keys, with an 8Mpixel camera and a 2Mpixel front camera. It uses a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

Further up the Iconia range, the company showed 7 in and 10in Iconia Android tablets, as well as a Windows tablet with an optional keyboard.

the Iconia Tab A100 has a 7in 1024 x 600 pixel screen, two cameras and runs Android 3.0 Honeycomb on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor.  The Icona Tab A500 has a 10.1in 1280 x 768 screen, and the same processor / OS combination.

The Tab W500 Windows tablet might be a distinctive one, running Windows 7, and including an optional keyboard dock, with USB and ethernet ports – perhaps as an admission that till the Tablet edition of Windows emerges, the OS doesn’t yet cut it as a proper tablet operating system.

The W500 has an AMD C-50 processor and Radeon HD6250 graphics, and uses the Acer “ring” front end, previously seen on the company’s dual-screen laptop.

Also unlike the Android tablets, the W500 has a UK release date (early March) and a recommended price tag: £449,  or £529 with the dock.