Acer Liquid Mini and BeTouch E210 hands-on

Acer didn't just land in Vegas with Iconia tablets galore -- it brought along its new Liquid Mini and BeTouch E210 Froyo smartphones. The 3.2-inch Liquid Mini is the most interesting of the two, and like its larger older brothers, it's made of a black glossy plastic, which is bound to pick up more fingerprints than Sherlock Holmes. It will be actually be available in quite a number of hues, but Acer only had the black one on display. Still it's one cute phone, and with a 600MHz Qualcomm 7227 processor, 512MB of memory, and a 5 megapixel cam it's bound to fill Acer's mid-range smartphone offering quite nicely. That said, the unit we saw hanging around Acer's private suites wasn't working all that well -- in fact, it rebooted itself twice. This one was running Acer's own software layer on top of 2.2; the BeTouch E210 seemed to be running stock Froyo. Speaking of the BeTouch, it's a lot like the E130 with its BlackBerry-like form factor and awesome physical keyboard, except the E210 has been slimmed down and upgraded to that aforementioned 600MHz Qualcomm CPU. The E310 on display was working much better than the Liquid and while it wasn't blazing fast, it kept up with our scrolling and navigating in and out of menus. No word on US availability, but they should be hitting the UK market sometime soon. Hit the break for some beauty shots.