Computer maker Acer wants to drive down the cost of smartphones to the point in which mobile operators could give them away for free, a sentiment that’s sure to sit well with their larger, more established rivals already fretting about falling margins.

PCworld.com reports that Acer, which raised a few skeptical eyebrows when it announced it was entering the handset market last month, will release two of these low-cost phones in October. Both are touch screen models that run on Windows Mobile 6.5. One, codenamed F1, has a 5-megapixel camera, and a widget user interface. The other, code named L1, has a GPS receiver, a sliding numeric keypad, and a virtual QWERTY keyboard.

Acer’s Smart Handheld Business Group head Aymar de Lencquesaing, speaking at CeBit where PCworld was reporting from, reasoned that there were 4 billion mobile phone users on the planet, but only 200 million smartphone users. Driving down the price and enabling operators to give the phones away free (on a contract) was the “surest way to drive adoption,” he said.

More after the jump

De Lencquesaing has said in the past that the Taiwanese vendor wants to be one of the top-five smartphone manufacturers in five years (doesn’t everybody?). Acer Chairman J.T. Wang has also said that the company needs to enter the cell phone space as increasingly more and more people are accessing the internet with their phones, a method which may one day supersede PCs altogether. If they don’t enter the smartphone market, then in three years time he estimates cell phone makers will enter theirs. But it’s not going to be as easy as giving away devices for free. Acer may have mastered the art of selling netbooks and laptops at cut-rate prices in the highly-commoditized PC market, but smartphones more than PC’s require a more finely-tuned user experience, especially as more internet services move onto them. Plus cellphones are a much more personal device than PCs and consumers have demonstrated that the style or coolness of a phone matters. Can Acer pull of this off? They’ll have to do something radically different to their PC offerings.