Acer Liquid A1

Full Review

Since it was unveiled late last year, Acer’s Liquid A1 smartphone has generated quite a bit of interest. The Acer entered our labs last week and I have been busy putting it through its paces. Let’s see how this Android phone does.

Features

The Liquid A1’s price-point puts it in the high-end category and appropriately, it has most features that phones like the OmniaHD, HTC Hero, HTC HD2 and Nokia N97mini boast of. The Acer supports 3G and Wi-Fi and can be used as a GPS navigation device. It uses Google’s Android v1.6 mobile OS and brings to the table a bunch of new, exciting features. Some of the changes from the v1.5 of the OS (which we saw on the LG GW620, reviewed last week) include a better Android Market UI, faster search and camera operations and enhancements made to the media gallery, among others.

The Acer Liquid comes with two exclusive pre-installed applications- Splinlets and urFooz. The former lets you stream and listen to selected tracks from a large number of international music albums. urFooz lets you create an animated avatar that you can post on social networks. Other notable pre-installed apps include Documents to Go and nemoPlayer. Apart from these applications, there are the usual Google Mobile Services applications such as Google Maps and GTalk which work very well. Also, you can sync your Google contacts, calendar and tasks; plus you can also download a great number of free apps and games from the excellent Android market.

The Acer uses all standard ports including a miniUSB port and a 3.5mm headphones jack. It has a large 3.5 inch TFT capacitive touchscreen and a 5MP camera but no flash. It has 256MB of internal memory and comes with a 2GB microSD card.

Design & Usability

I have no qualms in saying that the Acer Liquid A1 is one beautiful looking phone. It features the same design as both the Acer neoTouch and the Acer beTouch E101. The model I reviewed was completely black and it looked gorgeous. However, it uses a ton of glossy black plastic which meant that it was also getting smudged with fingerprints quite a bit. Also, the all plastic body resulted in unwanted creaks from various parts of the phone’s anatomy. Overall though, the phone’s build quality was decent. Also, the Acer’s display looks very good and manages to remain visible even under sunlight.

The Liquid’s touch UI responds nicely to touch and is smooth and breezy. Typing on the virtual keyboard is also a good experience as it is fairly accurate. The phone’s accelerometer also works well and is quick to get into play. Acer hasn’t done too much to the default interface and I don’t have any complaints with that.

Multimedia & Browsing

The Acer’s default browser works excellently and the large screen and responsive touchscreen combine to make browsing on the phone a pleasure. It also renders pages very well and only stumbles a bit when it comes to Flash content.

The Acer’s 5MP camera is just about okay when shooting portraits or landscapes in daylight. But still the images I shot appeared washed out with contrast and white balance levels that weren’t very appealing. Under standard indoor illumination the results were similar and the camera failed to capture details and at times even failed to focus properly. Low-light shots were predictably terrible since there is no flash. Videos I recorded were also pixilated and not very good to watch on a computer screen.

Music playback was much better. I plugged in a pair of Soundmagic PL-30 earphones and music on the Acer sounded loud and clear. It was particularly good at playing mids and highs although Rock and Hip-Hop tracks sounded a bit thin. The Acer comes with a pair of regular ear-bud headphones which are average. The Acer’s external speaker is not too loud and not very clear either.

Bottom Line

For a first go at a new OS, the Acer Liquid does very well. And it definitely helped me forget the dual disappointments of the neoTouch and the beTouch E101. At Rs. 25,000 (MRP in India), the Liquid is expensive and does not offer very good multimedia performance but it also does a number of things very well. All in all, a good buy if you are particularly interested in the Android OS.