Acer Liquid E Android smartphone
Dripping with features?
Review Acer has been a bit of a late starter in the smartphone game but has been working hard to catch up and gain a similar reputation to what it has with computers – decent quality machines that deliver the specs without excessive prices.
Flooding the market? Acer's Liquid E
Among Acer’s most advanced handsets yet is the Liquid E, which goes some way to close the gap with other better-known Android brands. It's an advance on the previous Liquid with an upgrade to Android 2.1 Éclair, plus a Snapdragon processor, 5Mp camera, GPS and Wi-Fi.
The Liquid E has its own distinct look, with sleek shiny black plastic all over and a gently curving top and bottom with tapered sides. It's fairly hefty at 115 x 64 x 13mm and 135g, yet there's a certain cool caché in the way the uniform black blends into the screen in repose.
However, it doesn't feel quite as sturdy as its Android rivals from HTC, Samsung and others, thanks to its cheapish plastic casing, untroubled by metal adornments. Incidentally, it's available in black, red or white varieties, as well as a limited edition Ferrari version.
The touch screen sits above four touch-sensitive buttons for home, search, back and menu, while the sides feature hard buttons for volume, camera shutter and power. On top is a 3.5mm headphone jack plus flashing LED icons to tell you when you have messages or an incoming call or need to recharge the battery.
Ferrari branded incarnation, if you must
The large 3.5in screen is a multi-touch one, so you can do the pinch-to-zoom thing in your Android browser, Google Maps and pictures, and it offers a reasonably sharp 800 × 480 resolution.
COMMENTS
Probably because
most of the market just assume that a bigger megapixel number is always better and wouldn't know what 'optics' meant anyway. And the manufacurers know it.
Acer
I purchased several Acer laptops for service engineers and after about 8 months 50% of the dvd drives had failed. Acer replaced each one within ~3 days and we have had no other issues.
+5 for Acer support, -1 for build quality but these things were dirt cheap :)
If the phone breaks you can trust the warranty, if you break it you have insurance.
Beer, my old phones love diving in.
Hmmm
Acer Desire + 2.1 (Eclair update) = Desire E ... you can pick up a plain old Desire for around £200 at the mo, utter bargain. @LAGMonkey - have a look on the Acer support site for 2.1 ...
Only problem is the firmware is not recognised by Google so you can't buy anything in the marketplace ... 'teapot' and 'chocolate' spring to mind.
Reg - can you make sure part of your testing for all Android phones is a trip to the marketplace to try to buy something like 'National Rail' or some of the better known games? Ta - this problem has also affected HTC phones too.
Acer have released an update
Android 2.1 is available for the Acer Liquid from here: http://www.acer.co.uk/acer/service.do?LanguageISOCtxParam=en&miu10einu24.current.attN2B2F2EEF=3734&sp=page15e&ctx2.c2att1=17&miu10ekcond13.attN2B2F2EEF=3734&CountryISOCtxParam=UK&ctx1g.c2att92=122&ctx1.att21k=1&CRC=2980211862
I have to admit from that page they could have done a better job of naming the update but it certainly does exist.
As to the hardware, they aren't completely identical the Liquid E has 512MB RAM as opposed to the Liquid's 256MB, but apart from that I can't discern any other differences.
Price is not in its favour
Since you can get the quite superior HTC Desire for around £360, probably less if you look more than I did, I have a feeling that unless the price of this is nearer £280 it will do poorly in comparison. With the Desire HD supposedly on the way for around £400~ the Desire will likely drop a little in price making this even less appealing.
