Other Features

Figure 29: Namecard Manager is an attempt to use the camera for Optical Character Recognition for business cards.

The F900 includes the entire standard suite of Windows Mobile Professional software and provides a few extras as well. In the Multimedia folder, you have the FM Tuner, Namecard Manager and Streaming Player. The FM Tuner is pretty much what you'd expect and it works well. The Namecard Manager uses the camera to take a picture of a business card and attempts to use OCR to populate a contact record from it. I found accuracy to be a bit spotty. Finally, the Streaming Player uses the RTSP protocol to deliver streaming video. In using the Streaming Player, I found myself missing the dedicated YouTube application that HTC provides on its phones.

Figure 30: The finger friendly Task Manager is both handy and attractively designed.

A number of useful utilities are also provided. Those include a basic backup utility and a memory optimization utility. In addition, you have a rather clever touch-enabled task manager that you can use to drag icons to a trash can in order to stop them. Voice Commander is similar to Microsoft's Voice Command, allowing voice-activated dialing, application launching, music playing and more.

The F900 includes a SiRF Star III GPS chipset, which has been the standard over the past few years. After the customary cold start, I was able to get enough satellites to navigate in 10 - 15 seconds. No dedicated navigation software is provided, so Google Maps will have to suffice. The F900 is capable of taking advantage of everything Google Maps has to offer.

Conclusions

The F900 shows that Acer has the potential to go up against the "big dogs" from HTC. A big beautiful screen in a relatively compact unit is a good start and if all other things were equal, the F900 would be a strong competitor for the Touch Diamond2. However, a smaller amount of RAM, a less sensitive screen and a less capable touch interface put it in the TD2's shadow. If Acer were to correct the last 3 items with the F900's successor, that phone could be a real contender. In the meantime, competitive pricing makes the F900 a reasonable lower cost alternative to the TD2.