Acer Liquid deals & review

One of the world’s leading computer maker based in Taiwan, Acer, joins the Android bandwagon with it first Android smartphone called Acer Liquid. It is powered by one of the most powerful mobile phone processors, the 1 GHz Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon.

It’s the company’s second Snapdragon handset after its neoTouch. From a distance, Acer’s recent smartphones in either platform are starting to looks the same sporting the same the monolithic touchscreen slab form factor. One may have to check out first if what they are looking is an Android or a Windows smartphone.

Android Features

Google is silent on whether older Android platforms can have a clear upgrade path to the newer Android 2.1 Éclair as most, if not all Android implementation, uses the maker’s User Interface tweaking the open source OS to give them some distinguishing features. 

The Liquid is one of them as it still uses the older Android 1.6 Donut with the Acer UI 3.0. It also gets preloaded with a document viewer for common MS Office and PFD files. As a socially aware smartphone, it gets Facebook and Flickr integration apps.

The Liquid gets 3G on the tri band UMTS with HSDPA at 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA at 2 Mbps data speeds for fast internet surfing and downloading experience. It’s also a quad band GSM with class 10 GPRS/EDGE data speeds on the 2G/2,5G network. 

It also supports hotspot internet access with its WiFi 802.11b/g as well as local high speed data transfers using Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and miniUSB 2.0 for wireless and wired options. It comes with SatNav functionality with a built-in GPS receiver supporting A-GPS.

The display is 0.3” smaller than on the neoTouch but at 3.5-inches, it gets a more cutting edge capacitive touchscreen technology which Windows Mobile has no native support and shows the clear advantage of Android over it, among many others.

It sports a WideVGA resolution and a color depth of 256k colors, another edge over the Windows 64k limitation. Imaging gets the same 5 megapixel autofocus with geo tagging and VGA video recording at 20fps. This imaging without flash support shows Android’s limitation in this version.

Multimedia entertainment on the Acer Liquid gets no FM radio but has the usual media players for audio files in the MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC+formats and video files in the MP4/WMV/H.264/H.263 content codecs. Stereo listening gets a choice of going wired using its 3.5mm audio jack or go wireless using its A2DP profile on Bluetooth.

Onboard memory storage gets 256MB Ram and 512MB ROM to run the Android OS and gets microSD expansion support for up to 32 GB. Its 1350 mAh li-ion battery yields a modest 5 hours of talk time and 400 hours of standby time on a full charge.