Acer Iconia Smart – the super widescreen smartphone

The Acer Iconia Smart stands out amidst the legions of Android smartphones launched at this year’s Mobile World Congress. It’s key feature is a 4.8in super-wide display using a cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio.

As you can see, above, this makes it ideal for watching epic movies shot in the 21:9 aspect ratio, though we’re not certain such films are that well suited for mobile viewing. The screen quality appeared to be excellent, with LED edge lighting providing a consistent brightness. There’s also a HDMI output for watching on a larger display, and Dolby Mobile technology for pseudo surround sound via the built-in speakers or headphones.

The display’s resolution is 1,024×480. With the handset in portrait mode you get a very long display, great for scanning down webpages, flip it around into landscape mode and the 1,024 horizontal resolution in sufficient to view most websites without any scaling – though your vertical resolution is then rather limited.

The handset has to follow the screen’s unusual dimensions of course, measuring an elongated 142x65x14mm but still only weighing in at a very reasonable 185g. It feels great in the hand, and fairly responsive with its 1GHz Snapdragon processor (no fancy Nvidia Tegra chipset here). However, a quick attempt to fit it in our pocket immediately showed the flaw in the design, with the top corner protruding from our jeans.

If you’re really into watching widescreen movies on the go then this a smartphone worth keeping an eye on,