Acer Liquid Metal deals & review

Following on from the success of the original Liquid and subsequent Liquid E Acer released the Liquid Metal which shares many common design features of the two original Liquid handsets while offering a number of improvements. The screen has had an upgrade from the Liquid E and the new Liquid Metal also features an improved user interface and updated edition of Google Android (2.2 Froyo).

Aesthetically the Liquid Metal is very similar to the original Liquid and Liquid E handsets, although the screen has been increased ever so slightly in size from 3.5" to 3.6". It still offers the same high resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and highly responsive capacitive touch sensitivity while at the same time seeing a significant upgrade in its colour depth from 256k colours to over 16 million colours. This little tweak alone makes the Liquid Metal offer a far superior visual experience compared to its predecessors.

While the camera on board the Liquid Metal is still a high quality 5 megapixel affair it now offers up the benefit of full 720p HD video recording (@30fps compared to the Liquid E´s 20fps VGA video recording). The camera also sees the addition of many other software features including face and smile detection. Internal storage is still set at 512MB for storing photos, or music and video content, and this can still be expanded with microSD cards with support for 32GB cards.

While the original Liquid had initially been rumoured to feature a 1GHz processor it, and the subsequent Liquid E, were eventually released with a 768MHz Snapdragon CPU on board instead. The Liquid Metal has seen an upgrade in processing power to 800MHz, which while still not the 1GHz processor originally touted for the Liquid handsets still offers an exceptionally slick and seamless experience.

The Liquid Metal still offers up an excellent media player for music and video playback, as well as social network integration, MS Office document editors and Picasa integration. It also has a great range of Google features on board, including YouTube, Google Talk, Gmail and Google Maps for you to make use of. While the Liquid Metal still features Bluetooth, microUSB, GPRS and EDGE as well as Wi-Fi, the HSDPA 3G connection has been doubled in speed from 7.2Mbps to 14.4Mbps. While this offers noticeable improvements in 3G connection speeds the HSUPA (upload) speed has remained the same.

The Acer Liquid Metal is essentially and upgrade of the Liquid E which was itself an upgrade of the original Liquid. The main areas of improvement include the latest version of Android, an improved interface from Acer, HD video support for the camera and increased speed for the 3G connections on board. The processor has also had a slight tweak to round of the phones performance. The Acer Liquid Metal is certainly a desirable phone that ticks all the right boxes but might not offer very significant improvements to previous Liquid handsets.