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Hmm. That initially sounds awful to me, but Acer isn’t the same Acer they once were. My 1st experience with Acer was a horrible one. I transferred to Guam and found myself living in a 2 bed room hotel for at least 30 days while the Navy found housing for my family and I. This ended up being 62 days. This was in the mid 90s where I used to build all my own PCs. Well, being in a hotel, I went with a quick temp fix. I bought an Acer PC from the base exchange for a good price. I think it was a 386 dx2/66 for $1400. It was garbage. Proprietary crap inside and out. No upgradability, etc… I got by for the rest of the 62 days and swore I would never buy another Acer. I ended up selling it in the Guam newspaper for $1200 a couple weeks after we moved into base housing and I got my own computers back.

So what’s that got to do with Mobility? Nothing, but Acer is reportably coming out with a Windows Mobile Smartphone in the future. Acer bought out E-TEN and said in a conference recently that they were getting out of the Pocket PC business and into the Smartphone business. On top of that, they expect it to make up 10% of it’s sales. Here is an excerpt from an article on Crave.

At its first-quarter investor relations conference in Taipei on Wednesday, Acer President Gianfranco Lanci said the company would release its first smartphone–a Windows Mobile device–by the end of this year or early next year, and that smartphones will account for 10 percent of company revenue.

Acer made its interest in the smartphone market very clear in March, when it purchased fellow Taiwanese company E-Ten, which makes smartphones under the Glofiish brand.

At the conference, Acer said E-Ten would shift entirely to smartphones and away from PDAs, which it has sold in the past. In another change, the new Acer smartphone will be sold through wireless carriers, instead of directly to retail, as E-Ten has historically done.

Does this mean no more Glofiish devices? I never liked that name anyhow. Does anyone else think bad things when the name Acer is used? Now, I have learned in my short 36 years that you have to give people a second chance sometimes. I think I should give Acer another one too. I am indeed excited to hear that they plan to make a Smartphone. I think they should also continue making the Glofiish line, but kill that name. I also like the idea of going with carriers and forgetting the direct sales model.

Chris Leckness (3547 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.