Phone Review: Acer Liquid Metal Smartphone
Acer has been incessantly attempting to nail its presence in the smartphone section of the market with its already launched handsets like the Tempo range and Liquid and Liquid Ferrari.
However, its new Liquid Metal has so far proved to be the best of the lot.
Look and Feel of Acer's Liquid Metal phone
- The Liquid Metal comes in an elliptical shape that has both front and back curved slightly outwards.
- The front is black plastic that has a 3.6 inch capacitive 800 x 480 display and four touch keys (home, search, back and menu) below it.
- The back is equipped with a steel plate covering the battery, with a 5 megapixel camera and a flash above it.
- The specifications under the hood are decently good too. A 512 MB RAM, 800 Mhz Qualcomm 7230 Snapdragon processor, support for HSDPA (where available), and Dolby Mobile sound for music.
- The Operating system used to run all these applications is Android 2.2.
What is new in Acer's Liquid Metal Phone?
The Liquid is equipped with Acer's own interface which is called "Breeze". Apart from being just a widget, it also gives a complete new dimension to using an Android device.
There are two layers:
- The first one comes up when you unlock the phone and allows you to look through a whole lot of widgets, which provide you the information about social networks, the weather and the like.
- The moment you flick over this, you are lead to the second home screen, which allows you to flick through your recent apps and video and music collections on your device.
Pros:
1) Brilliant performance: Although you might think the 800 MHz processor may be a bit slow when compared to 1 GHz processors, this phone doesn't give you any slow downs.
2) Camera and picture quality is quite good.
3) Excellent audio and sound quality, when compared to what was given by the previous Acer handsets.
4) Equipped with general connectivity options.
Cons:
1) The notification bar, which is quite a differentiating point of Android, comes in the middle of the second layer that too at the bottom of a running app, which may take some getting used to.
2) You are not given a choice to customize any of the second layer of screens, which might annoy some Android fans who like tweaking their handsets all the time for their own fun.
3) The onscreen keyboard is quite cramped.
4) Low battery life: Heavy android users might need to charge this phone daily.
Overall verdict: It does take some getting used to, but these changes give a fresh look to the device from the oversupply of Android handsets in the market. Acer Liquid Metal phone seems to be a decent, in fact quite a quality proposal for those who are looking for an all touchscreen high end smartphone with a difference.
