Acer Tempo M900 review

The Acer M900's large 3.8in TFT LCD resistive touch screen cuts quite a dash, and it's bigger than most of its rivals like the 3.6in HTC Pro2, or the 3.5in iPhone. It offers 800x480-pixel resolution and it's sharp, bright and clear, though the option to save on the not terribly impressive battery life by dimming the screen is well worth taking

There are two programmable soft keys at the bottom and you can adjust the scroll speed of the touch screen as well as set exceptions for various programmes but you can't change the sensitivity. This is a shame, because it's really not as sensitive as it could be, and we found ourselves having to make several presses to activate apps and links on too many occasions.

Keyboard

Other recent QWERTY keyboard phones like HTC's Touch Pro2 or Nokia's N97 allow you to angle the screen for the optimum viewing/typing interface angle, but the M900's having none of that malarkey – it simply slides out, rather sharply, and expects you to get on with it.

On the face of it, this keyboard should be a bit of a cracker with four lines of well-spaced, backlit keys, including direction arrows, plus two additional soft keys at either side and indicator lights for the Fn and Caps functions. They're arranged in a gently curved crescent and there are 41 keys in all. The number keys are doubled up on the letter keys and are accessed by pressing the Fn key.

It looks great, but the keys aren't as responsive or as well-defined as we'd hoped and we couldn't always tell when we were striking the right keys. Having to press two keys for a full stop or '@' never goes down well with us either.