Acer Liquid – high-end multimedia features

Thumbs Up:

Acer Liquid has numerous extra preinstalled applications for enhancing multimedia features. It has sporty and fun look. 3G support, GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are on onboard.

Thumbs Down:

The touch screen is not quick responsive and makes keyboard usage quite frustrating. It also does not have multi-touch features.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: GSM / 3G
Band: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (Quad-band) / 3G 850/1900/2100 (Tri-band)
Phone Design: PDA
Caller ID: Yes
Other Features: Class 10 GPRS, A-GPS, touch-screen, micro-SD card slot, USB

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Acer Liquid is powered by 768MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It has 512MB ROM, 256 MB RAM and micro-SD expansion slot that accepts up to 32GB cards. The operating system is Google Android 1.6. Supported wireless interfaces are Bluetooth 2.0 EDR and IEEE 802.11 b/g.

3.5 inches capacitive touch-screen LCD display has a resolution of 480×800 pixels. Acer Liquid features inbuilt proximity sensor and accelerometer. The additional features are Class 10 GPR, HSDPA, 3G support, Wi-Fi, A-GPS and Bluetooth. Messaging features include multimedia and text messages, email and instant messengers.

Android Liquid has 5-megapixel camera of 2560×1920 pixels resolution. It features auto-focus, geo-tagging and video recording. The Android media player supports videos of H.263, H.264, WMV and MP4 formats and music tracks of eAAC+, WMA, WAV and MP3 formats.

Acer Liquid has 1350mAH lithium ion battery that has a life of 5 hours talk time and 400 hours of idle standby time. Accessories supplied inside the package include user manual, screen protector, wired stereo headphone, power adapter, 2GB micro-SD card and adapter, USB cable, and AC adapter.

Razzle Dazzle:

Acer Liquid is available in white, red and black colors. Our test model has white color that provides nice contrast against black screen. The Liquid is 4.52 inches tall, 2.51 inches wide and 0.5 inch deep and weighs 4.76 ounces. The smartphone is lightweight and its plastic casing is little crafty.

Inside Dope:

It is always a pleasant surprise to see an Android phone from new player. Acer has launched its first Android smartphone – Acer Liquid. It offers more features and its multimedia applications also good. However, we found some performance issues while testing so we don’t recommend this device. Acer Liquid is available in the U.K., but not in the U.S. You can purchase unlocked version of Acer Liquid for $400.

3.5 inches capacitive touch-screen LCD display of Acer Liquid has WVGA resolution of 480×800 pixels. It shows smooth text and images with bright colors. The colors do not pop from display like that of Nexus One.

The touch screen is responsive, but not so quick and sensitive like that of Nexus One. We had to apply more pressure for scrolling through lists and moving between home screens while testing. The situation was same with the onscreen virtual keyboard as it did not recognize taps occasionally. Acer Liquid features inbuilt proximity sensor as well as accelerometer, but does not have multi-touch capability and double tap to zoom. The accelerometer is limited to certain applications.

The user interface of Acer Liquid resembles standard Android. There are three home screen panels that can be customized with widgets and shortcuts. You will find a pull-out application tray located on the bottom at each screen. You will get a small toolbar on left panel at the top, which provides shortcuts for user-defined multimedia contents such as video, music or photos.

The touch sensitive controls for back, search, menu and home button are located beneath the display. The home button has “rectangle” icon and back button is denoted by (<) “less than” symbol. If you hold down the Home button then a screen will appear to show mini-windows of all running applications and allow switching between them. LED indicators for charging status/low battery life, calls and new emails are located on the top.

3.5mm headphone jack also sits on the top of Acer Liquid. Camera activation/capture key and volume rocker are located on the right side. Phone lock/power button sits on the left side. The Liquid uses mini-USB port for PC sync/charging.

Acer Liquid uses Google Android 1.6 as operating system. Its feature set is quite similar to T-Mobile myTouch 3G and Motorola Devour. The smartphone offers Google services including Android Market, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Talk and Gmail. It also merges contact information from numerous social networking Web sites and email accounts to one master list. At this master list, you can access favorites list, call logs and phone dialer. The smartphone also features Exchange synchronization via preinstalled DataViz RoadSync Mail and Calendar applications.

Acer also included some extra features in its Liquid smartphone. It has urFooz applications that can be used to create your avatar for sharing on MySpace, Facebook and other networking Web sites. The other applications to enhance multimedia features are nemoPlayer, Media Server and Spinlets.

Spinlets allows browsing and streaming tunes, sharing them via email or Facebook and accessing all Web sites of artists at one place. The nemoPlayer is another alternative to Android media player. It has better interface and single hub for all media files such as photos, videos and music. You can share all multimedia files from computer via Wi-Fi connection using Media Server application. These multimedia applications take the Acer Liquid on the top of other Android smartphones in the market.

Acer Liquid has 5-megapixel camera without any flash. Moreover, the camera application is little sluggish. The capture button sits on the downward slope of a narrow edge, which is quite difficult to find and press. We capture some still photographs for testing. The picture quality was sharp in normal lighting. The pictures looked soft with little richness of colors. The camera also features geo-tagging of photos. You can record the VGA videos at 20fps.

Acer Liquid supports quad-band GSM phone that features world roaming. You can access AT&T’s 3G network from the phone. The other features of smartphone are Android Webkit HTML Browser without Flash support, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, multimedia and text messaging, conference calling and speakerphone. We are disappointed that the Liquid does not have features of smart dialing and voice dialing.

We made few calls through quad-band based Acer Liquid via AT&T service. The overall call quality was good and admirable. We received loud and clear sound at our end with a bit background noise. The callers also received good sound at their end without any weird sound or voice distortion. The speakerphone calls were a bit tinny and both of us noticed little background hissing. We did not face any problem in pairing the Bluetooth headsets from Motorola S9 and Logitech Mobile Traveller.

We used AT&T’s 3G network to test the browsing speeds of Acer Liquid. The Microsoft.com website loaded in 25 seconds and a Google search took 15 seconds to complete. The YouTube videos took few seconds to buffer and then played continuously. One MP4 movie trailer played better with smooth transitions. The audio quality on both included wired headset and our Bose On-Ear headphones was impressive.

While testing, we noticed some humming sounds from the processor occasionally. The Liquid performed good for multitasking, but it delayed in launching any application.

Acer Liquid has 1350mAH lithium ion battery that has a life of 16 days idle standby time and 5 hours of talk time.

Nitty Gritty:

Acer Liquid is one of the best Android smartphones with extra multimedia applications. If you can afford the extensive price tag for latest multimedia Android smartphone and does not mind the slow performance and camera without flash, then you can purchase new Acer Liquid.