Acer Mobile Latam earlier this month launched the new Sospiro A15 phone, which will arrive this summer and turn heads with its full-color selfie rear screen. That would be good enough if this were a $1,000-plus flagship like the iPhone 17 Pro or the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max — which lends itself heavily to design — but the A15 is a budget phone expected to cost around $150 to $250. Holy affordability, Batman. What gives?
It’s been a little over a decade since we last saw an Acer-branded smartphone in the US. However, Acer Mobile Latam is not the same Acer you may know from laptops, tablets and monitors. The Sospiro A15 is manufactured by Senwa Global International, which licenses the Acer brand of electronic products throughout Latin America and is a completely different product from anything Acer sells in the US today. That means the A15 won’t be sold on US carriers, but the phone is still worth checking out to see how the brand has managed to pack such a high-end feature into a budget price.
Trickle-down gimmickry
The back of the A15 is dominated by an iPhone 17 Pro-esque plateau with 64-megapixel cameras, and this phone’s claim to fame: a 1.88-inch full-color rear display. With 284×240 pixels and TFT technology, this isn’t the brightest or best-looking screen, but it probably gets the job done, displaying notifications and music controls, and doubling as a selfie viewfinder.
In comparison, the 976×596-pixel Magic Back Screen on the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max is a 2.9-inch LTPO AMOLED panel running at 120Hz with a peak brightness of 3,500 nits – big, bright and bright enough to read in broad daylight. It’s the same concept, but at a very different level of execution, which makes sense given the very different budget.
Unsurprisingly, Acer uses cheap materials and bets that budget buyers will be happy with the worst screen at the lowest price. It’s a smart move considering the phones the A15 will make actually compete with no selfie screens to speak of.
A modest specification sheet
Beyond the selfie-screen razzle-dazzle, the Sospiro A15 is a budget phone with budget phone components and specs. The large 6.67-inch IPS display with 1,600 × 720-pixel resolution and 120Hz refresh isn’t bad. A 5,000 mAh battery and 18-watt wired charging are fine. And while 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage isn’t anything to get excited about, its SD card slot for up to 1TB of expansion is becoming increasingly rare in 2026. Perhaps the most notable budget-spec tell is the midtier Unisoc T615 octa-core SoC, which you’d expect to find in phones that fight for less than $200.
None of this is embarrassing on the part; It’s just not the part that many tech enthusiasts tend to think about. To its credit, the A15 distinguishes itself with creature comforts like a side-mounted fingerprint reader, face unlock and NFC with Google Wallet support. The handset also has an IP64 rating – splash resistance that most budget phones skip – which is a good inclusion for its expected price.
Price and availability
Acer has yet to announce pricing for the Sospiro A15, which is expected to arrive this summer. Based on the documents, we expect something in the range of $150 to $250 once the local price firms have increased. The phone won’t be sold in the US, but buyers in Latin American markets who want to replace the selfie screen can buy five or six A15s for the price of the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max (starting north of $1,000 in markets where it’s sold) and still have money left over for cases.
There’s a lot more to both phones than just a game of rear screens, but that doesn’t change the fact that the budget phone now includes a feature Xiaomi was charging for a flagship less than a year ago. When everything costs more, that feels like a small win within reach.
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