Acer Liquid Metal

Page 1: Intro; Features; Design & Usability

The Acer Liquid Metal is the newest in Acer’s line-up of Android phones. It is one of the least expensive high-end smartphones in the market and boasts of a redesigned UI and a bunch of exclusive apps. Can the Liquid Metal finally be the Android smartphone to push Acer into the big league of phone manufacturers?

Features

The Acer Liquid Metal may not have a 1GHz processor like its competition (it has to do with an 800MHz Qualcomm processor) but its specs are not less than impressive. Graphics are taken care of by a dedicated Adreno 205 GPU and it has 512MB of RAM. The Acer has a 5MP camera with an LED flash to take photos and can also record 720p videos @ 30fps. It runs on Android 2.2 (Froyo).

The Liquid Metal’s display is a 3.6-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 480x800 and 16M color output. It also supports Wi-Fi, GPS and 3G. It has a downstream bandwidth of 14.4 Mbps (HSDPA) and an upstream bandwidth of 2 Mbps (HSUPA) which is essentially the optimum download and upload speeds that you can get on your 3G network (keep in mind, these speeds are heavily dependent on external factors and network connectivity).

The Acer Liquid Metal comes pre-installed with a bunch of interesting applications. Social Jogger is one such app that provides a cool looking “jog-wheel” interface to browse your Twitter and Facebook feeds. Another note-worthy app is Spinlets, an app that lets you stream new music from an impressive catalogue of artists. Of course being an Android device, the Liquid Metal has a full quota of Google’s Mobile apps available at its discretion.

Design & Usability

The Acer Liquid Metal fits right into the design mould debuted by the original Acer Liquid. There are a couple of subtle changes though; for instance, instead of the entirely relying on plastic, the Acer’s battery cover is made of metal (thus the name). While it still looks good, I wish Acer had come up with a newer look than continuing trend that’s at least a year old.

The Acer has a sufficiently large screen that looks quite good in spite of neither being AMOLED nor SLCD. Unfortunately, the screen’s visibility does go down considerably under direct sunlight.

The Acer sports its own home-grown UI- Breeze that is quite different from the default Android UI especially in the way it deals with the concept of homescreens and widgets. The Acer just three regular homescreens, only one of which can be customized with shortcuts; of the remaining two- you can browse through your multimedia files on one while the other one hosts screenshots of the last accessed apps/menus and allows you to access them with one touch.



Now, you might think that this serves as a kind of task manager but that’s not the way it works. All it does is give you quick access to the last accessed apps. If the single customizable homescreen makes you wonder where the Liquid lets you put widgets then you will have to look at the lock screens. The Acer offers five side-scrolling lock screens that can be customized with various widgets. You can always access these lock screens by touching the home button for a while. A set of eight shortcuts reside on the main homescreen and can be swapped around with shortcuts from the main menu.

I had a chat with a senior executive from Acer about the Breeze UI and he explained it as offering “something different” to the user. While I respect the sentiment, the fact is that the new Acer UI albeit “different”, doesn’t actually improve the default Android UI and just exists as a different way of doing things which, I feel, was just forcing me to unlearn parts of the Android UI I was already comfortable with without any tangible benefits. If you are really sick of the way Android’s default UI looks and works then I guess, the Breeze UI could work for you but it definitely didn’t do much for me. If you feel the way I do then you’d be better off switching back to the default UI.

The Liquid works reasonably well but there is some sluggishness in the way it responds to touch input. The virtual keyboard is also accurate most of the time although if you’re used to bigger screens, typing on the 3.6-inch screen in portrait mode may feel a little uncomfortable.