We just went hands on with the Android and Snapdragon powered Acer Liquid. While most handsets we handled here were prototypes, we were lucky enough to get a few minutes with Mr Richard Tans’ (Country Head, Acer India & Sales Manager Asia Pacific) retail version. The red, white and black colours of the liquid compliment the elegant design. Though a little thicker than my iPhone 2G, the liquid is quite good to handle and easily pocketable. The all plastic body is shiny, but the glossy finish here acts like a fingerprint magnet resulting in a lot of smudges . Also, we feel that the length of the phone below the screen could have been reduced (or the screen size increased? Better buttons? More buttons?), less they wanted to advertise their brand Acer or so it seems.
We tried web, music and video on the beautiful 3.5? screen and the HD video play back (1080 pixels) is surely an attraction (we saw the transformers HD trailer). The 5MP camera looks sturdy enough however you might miss the flash here. Sadly I could only click images from the prototypes and not the final version, thanks to androids no Bluetooth file transfer behavior (we were told there is an App download for that though). Liquid runs on the android OS v1.6, and if you are looking forward to an 2.0 upgrade, wait till April (they aren’t very certain on that either). However, the Liquid has some customizations of its own by Acer. The homescreen gets a quick settings panel that gives you instant access to wifi, bluetooth, brightness etc.
The music output over the headphones matches the Nokia 5800 while the speaker sounds way better than most smartphones we have handled till date. Mr Tan also clarified that under-clocking the Snapdragon doesn’t affect the performance as the Android OS is pretty light according to him (saving a lot of battery at the same time). Acer has the Snapdragon running on the Neo touch at full potential, but that’s for the Windows Mobile which is much heavier compared to the Android built Liquid runs.
Now to add more spice to the phone; Acer is bundled with two fascinating Apps called the Spinlets and urFooz. You can stream latest music for free online (obviously you have to bear the operator costs). With urFooz you can create an animated avatar of yours and share them online on social sites or via email. Looks useless to me, but there might be a demand for that. One more addition is the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 support which is preloaded in the phone, this would ideally be a feature we would get only from Android OS 2.0, but Acer has pre-bundled this with the help of a 3rd party app (DataViz Roadsync).
Acer Liquid India launch (Exclusive):
As per Mr Rajiv Babbar (national Distributor for Acer) the Acer Liquid will hit the shelves on the 3rd feb (in Mumbai and hopefully across the country as-well). The best buy price is Rs 23,250 (Mrp 24990).
