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Acer is a name most people associate with laptops rather than smartphone, but the company purchased the Glofiish brand in 2008 and released its first batch of handsets this year. These early offerings were a bit of a mixed bag. While the F900 was quite impressive, the X960 and M900 looked outdated before they had even hit the shelves. However, Acer is back with four handsets built on the new 'Windows Phone' (v6.5) operating system. We'll be taking a look at these phones in more detail over the coming weeks, but first up is the rather speedy neoTouch S200.

One thing is for sure, no one can accuse this handset of being under specified. For starters, it's only the second device, after Toshiba's TG01, to hit the market with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor. Of course, clock speed isn't everything when it comes to processors, but the Snapdragon really is a seriously fast CPU and the extra speed it offers is definitely noticeable here.

The processor is helped along by a decent amount of memory. There's 512MB of ROM (of which around 220MB is free) and 256MB of RAM (with 100MB free). Plus if you need more storage space you can add it via the microSD card slot which is slightly awkwardly placed under the battery cover (although mercifully you don't actually have to remove the battery to swap cards).

Acer hasn't skimped when it comes to the screen either. The display is quite large at 3.8in and, although it uses resistive rather than capacitance technology, it feels much more responsive than the screen used on Acer's F900 handset. The display also has a relatively high resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, which makes it ideal for viewing web pages, and as it's bright and produces really strong vibrant colours, videos and photos look ace.

Naturally, all the connectivity bases are covered off nicely. The phone is quad-band and supports HSDPA for fast data access on the move. There's also Bluetooth 2.1 EDR and Wi-Fi Wireless B and G (sadly N is not supported, but then it's hardly needed on a smartphone). As with most of today's smartphones the handset also has onboard GPS. There's no navigation software included, but Google Maps is preloaded and the GPS chip worked fine with this. However, it was a tad slow to lock onto satellites and determine our position from a cold start.

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