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Acer Liquid is a slick option
14 March 2010
Acer Liquid S100 smartphone
Pros: fast operation, thousands of apps, good at multitasking
Cons: touchscreen not sensitive enough, non-standard Mini-USB charger
Price: from €340 sim-free If Nokia, BlackBerry and Microsoft ever doubted the growing power of Android, they surely cannot doubt it now.
Yet another top-end Android smartphone has reached Ireland, this time made by the PC manufacturer Acer. Its Liquid handset wraps a lot of expensive hardware around Google’s nascent operating system. The result is quite impressive, if not market-leading. Here is how it performs.
Design
The Liquid looks and feels great. Although the body is a heavy, polished plastic, it feels solid in the hand. The phone comes with the now-familiar Android hardware set-up.
There are four touch-sensitive buttons on the bottom of the handset, with volume and camera buttons on one side. It has a 3.5mm earphone jack, but does not use the same shape Mini-USB charging standard as other new smartphones.
This means that you must use the charger supplied with the unit. It is not a particularly light smartphone, at 135g. It comes in a range of colours.
Screen
The 3.5 inch capacitive touchscreen is not as touch sensitive as its main rivals, which is a bit of a disappointment. It requires a firmer touch than other phones and it is tricky to ‘scroll’ through a menu list. I found that this resulted in a few too many unwanted applications opening.
Features and functions
The Liquid has a five megapixel camera. It works fine, but it’s a chore to try and share via Bluetooth, which is a pain, as it’s the only wireless-sharing technology which is free to use.
The phone does not have much memory built in, but comes with a 2GB memory card (expandable up to 32GB). It is meant to have an FM radio, but I didn’t find it on my handset (which also came with the wrong power unit and was programmed in Italian).
Operation and controls
The phone uses a ‘basic’ version of Android, which does not quite have the sophistication of rivals. Despite this, it is very simple to get around. It has three home screens you can scroll between, each of which is fully customisable.
Power and speed
The handset uses the latest high-speed processor, a Qualcomm Snapdragon. For some reason, it has clocked back the speed from the chipset’s available 1Ghz to around 750Ghz.
Despite this, the phone moves very quickly and has no problem multi-tasking between several applications.
Apps
As with all Android phones, the access to additional apps is a main draw. The phone connects directly to Google’s Market app store, where about 25,000 apps (some free, some paid) are available to download directly over the air.
Battery life
This handset’s battery life is better than most of its rivals. I got two days’ use from it which, for a smartphone, is a lot.
Conclusion
The Liquid is a nice phone. It is not as good as some of its rivals, but is cheaper.
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