TAIPEI, Taiwan - Newcomer to the smartphone-market Acer has announced its first Google Android-based smartphone, after revealing a series of Windows Phones earlier this year. The Acer A1 Liquid may be the key to the manufacturer's big entry to the economically-affected sector.

Acer made its debut into the smartphone market at this year's Mobile World Congress, after buying smartphone manufacturer E-Ten. The company then announced that it will focus on Windows Mobile and Google Android smartphones; although innovative in design, its Windows Mobile devices did not capture the market's attention, but the recently-announced Google Android-based A1 Liquid has generated much of the hype Acer will need to be successful in this sector.

The Acer A1 Liquid runs on the impressive 1GHz Snapdragon processor by Qualcomm, it features a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and geo-tagging, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and has a touchscreen display with 800x480 pixels in resolution. The smartphone will be based on Google Android 1.6 (Donut) with a customized user interface by Acer.

An early price listing at eXpansys puts the handset at €379.99 (US$567.48), with its release date on the 28th November 2009.

Acer also placed three of its Windows Mobile handsets in the new beTouch series: the E100 and E101 candybar handsets, and the E200 slider. Both devices run on Windows Mobile 6.5, adding to the already-announced Acer neoTouch S200.

The company plans to ship 400 000 to 500 000 smartphones by the end of this year, and by 2010 it believes it could hit 1.5m to 2m shipments, according to industry sources.

[€1 = US$1.49341]