Acer Launches New Smartphone

Acer Launches New Smartphone - the Liquid

Techtree News Staff, Jan 29, 2010 1812 hrs IST

The first Android based smartphone from Acer

Acer has announced its first Android based smartphone, the Acer Liquid, in India. It runs on the Android v1.6 (Donut) and is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor. However, this runs at 768MHz clock speed unlike the 1GHz version seen on the Nexus One and the Acer's own neoTouch Windows Mobile based Smartphone.

The Liquid measures 115 x 62.5 x 12.5mm and weighs 135g. It uses a 3.5-inch, 480 x 800 pixel WVGA display and uses the capacitive touchscreen technology for good touch response. It has an accelerometer for automatic UI rotation and proximity sensor for switching off the touchscreen during a call to prevent accidental presses.

The Liquid has a 3.5mm headphone jack that allows you to connect any headphones to it. It has status icons on the top which blink to indicate certain activities like low battery and missed calls and messages, etc.

The Liquid is a 3G HSDPA enabled handset and also has a built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v2.0 and A-GPS. It comes with a 5 megapixel camera and can also record videos in VGA resolution at 30 FPS. The phone is available in red, white and black colours.

We had a chance to use the device briefly today. The Liquid does look quite stylish, especially in the white and red colour. The curved corners look good and make the device fit well in your palm. The device is a bit big, thanks to the large 3.5-inch display, but not exactly massive and almost as large as the iPhone.

The display looked great indoors with good brightness and colours. The sensitivity was not perfect on the devices which we used and it was too sensitive, often selecting items on the screen when all we wanted to do was scroll. We were told that these were not retail handsets and prototypes so there could be some hardware issues.

The Snapdragon made the Android on the Liquid run quite smoothly and even enabled playback of high definition videos with ease. Activities like going through the menu, opening applications, browsing through images or surfing the web were done quite briskly without any noticeable lag as in previous Android devices.

On the software front, Acer has added a couple of interesting applications for things like streaming music on the device, etc. However, the overall software customizations aren't as much as HTC does in its Android phones.

Overall though, the Liquid did seem like a fairly decent phone but it will require a full test to give a final verdict. It is priced at Rs. 24,990 and the device will ship with a 2GB card in the bundle.