Acer, the Taiwanese netbook manufacturing company has decided to step into the smartphone market.  They announced this at Mobile World Congress and unveiled about 8 new handsets.  “The smartphone market is a natural direction of our long-term mobile strategy,” stated Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci.

The first four handsets will be available in March or APril.  The first Acer models will be the DX900, X960, M900 and F900.  These phones will be part of Acer’s Tempo line of phones and will feature touch-screen capabilities.  Last year, Acer acquired E-Ten, a phone manufacturing company.

Acer doesn’t make just netbooks anymore.  They are getting into the mobile industry by introducing the Acer X960 VGA and Acer DX650 handset this month.  The focus on this blog post however will be around the X960.  The Acer X960 will have a 2.8″ VGA 640×480 touchscreen with a 3G HSDPA and WiFi b/g built in.  The camera built into the phone is 3.2 megapixel with flash.

The phone will be powered by a 533MHz Samsung S3C 6410 processor with 128MB RAM and 256MB ROM.  Bluetooth and GPS will be supported on the X960 and there is a microSD card slot for additional memory.  The full details will be discussed at Mobile World Congress (MWC).

[via Slashgear]