Acer has largely stepped away from the smartphone industry in recent years; the company’s heavily focused on tablets, laptops, handheld gaming, and sometimes smart glasses these days. But today the company announced the Sospiro A15, a midrange smartphone with a rare rear display.
The Sospiro A15—which is, for now, limited to the Latin American market—puts its secondary display directly next to the phone’s rear camera array. It’s small, at 1.88 inches, with a resolution of 240 x 284. The rear display has relatively limited functionality; you’re not meant to be navigating your phone with it. Rather, it’s more for showing notifications, music controls, and a viewfinder for the rear camera.
This is very much a midrange phone, with a 6.67-inch HD IPS display and an entry-level Unisoc T615 chip (this thing doesn’t even have 5G!). It’s got just 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, though you can expand this with a microSD up to 1TB. The battery comes in at 5,000mAh and can be charged at up to 18W via USB-C. The cameras are powerful enough for a phone at this level; the front camera is 16 megapixels and the rear is 64 megapixels. The Sospiro A15 is IP64 dust and water resistant, runs Android 16, has a fingerprint reader, and there’s even a 3.5mm headphone jack, if you’re into that sort of thing. Pricing for the phone has not yet been announced.
It’s really that rear display that could be a major selling point for the Sospiro A15. The modern smartphone is relatively rote at this point, with major manufacturers like Samsung and Apple generally choosing to stick to the status quo rather than throw in a random fun feature like a rear display. Samsung’s new Galaxy A27, for example, shares many of the same specs as the Sospiro A15 but is otherwise very, very standard in terms of its design.
This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen a rear display on a smartphone (the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max has a nice one), but it’s nice to see that innovation trickling down from more premium phones. Of course, this one’s not available in the U.S. just yet—so we’ll have to stick with our boring budget options for the time being.
