With it’s stretched body, ultra wide touchscreen and super sharp resolution the iconia smart,er,smartphone is eye catching in more ways than one and is due May and price is tba.
This is not the first phone to get a 21:9 format ultra-wide screen (that honour goes to LG’s Chocolate BL40 from 2009), but the Iconia’s 1024x480 edge-lit LED touchscreen puts its predecessor to shame. At 4.8in It’s a whopper, making this an excellent candidate for watching widescreen video and spending horizontal time with the web.
Working away in the engine room of the good chip Iconia Smart is a Qualcomm 1GHz snapdragon processor. Six months ago that would’ve been more than adequate but with LG, Motorola and others unleashing dual-core smartphones, the Iconia Smart is already looking a little underpowered.
Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) brings improved task and power management, and thanks to the hardware’s gyroscope and accelerometer, better movement gaming controls, Flash and Wi-Fi hotspot skills are present as usual. Android 2.3 adds support for multiple cameras which you can make use of with the 8MP snapper at the back and the 2MP one on the front. A mini HDMI-out also means you can hook it up to the TV to play the 720p videos it shoots, or if your telly supports DLNA, you can stream them wirelessly.
Just like the Revo RL 100 media PC, the Iconia Smart has Acer’s Clear.fi software which is supposed to make sharing stuff over your home network simpler. It lets you wirelessly access music,videos and photos stored on other Clear.fi enabled gadgets and post them to social sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Facebook.
Techy Gadgetz says, Wide bold and beautiful but the Iconia Smart may be too quirky to worry the big boys.
