Acer Tempo M900

Acer's last and best Windows Smartphone?

Under the bonnet, the M900 is identical to the F900, so you get the same quad-band GSM, Edge, 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA 3G, 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, A2DP Bluetooth and a Samsung S3C 6410 533MHz processor with 128Mb of RAM to play with. The operating system is Windows venerable Mobile 6.1 Pro with Acer's bespoke Shell GUI draped over it with various degrees of elegance.

If fingerprint reading fails, using a password is still an option

Acer's Shell interface does the business, but hogs resources

At last, landscape browsing with Opera

We still think Acer Shell is too slow and too resource hungry, but on the M900 it performs no worse than it does on the F900. Thankfully, one of the shared glitches of the two handsets – a rather wayward accelerometer – is cured on the M900 with the screen swapping to landscape when it’s slid open. This allowed us to view the Opera web browser in landscape, something we didn't managed to accomplish with the F900.

The GPS rig is another area where a small but significant enhancement has been made over the F900. On the M900, it's now assisted GPS. This resulted in a noticeable improvement in the time it took for the phone to find itself when the GPS was switched on.