Acer Liquid Metal review - Chinks in the armour

For a company that's mostly known for its quality budget laptops, Acer made quite an impression when it announced the Acer Liquid Ferrari some time ago. The latest in the Liquid series is the Acer Liquid Metal. In classic Acer style, the smartphone is bursting with features, but is pinned with an affordable price tag. Is this good enough to threaten the titans of the smartphone industry?

First Impressions

As the name seems to suggest, the Acer Liquid Metal feels hefty to hold, but balances it out with curves in all the right places and clean lines that give it a sense of symmetry. The shiny black bezel encases a 3.6-inch WVGA capacitive touch screen, with four touch sensitive buttons at the bottom. Although this is a Android phone, which runs Froyo (version 2.2), Acer has done quite a bit when it comes to customisation. Although the buttons carry the same functions, they are depicted by Acer's own symbols. So you have Home, Search, Back and Menu, in that order.

The edges of the phone are chrome plated, with the bottom sporting the Mini USB port (for transfers as well as charging), and the right side equipped with a toggle switch and dedicated camera button. The top has the standard power button and 3.5 mm headphone jack. The top panel also has LED indicators, for charging, missed call and message. The dark brown, etched steel back panel is smooth to touch, and houses the 5-megger camera with flash, and a speaker at the bottom.

User Interface

Unless you go to your settings and manually change them, you'll be greeted with the Acer Breeze interface when you turn on the Acer Liquid Metal. Chances are you'll love or hate it. The Breeze interface works on two layers. When you first unlock the phone by pressing the power button, you're greeted with the first layer – which consists of five home screens, which you can customise with widgets of your choice. We found it a bit cumbersome to use despite the options offered. The bottom left of the first layer has a fold, which you turn over like a page.

This opens up the second layer of the interface. Swiping to the right reveals a ‘media' home screen, which provides shortcuts to your photos, music and videos. Swiping to the left brings up a history of recently used apps, for quick one touch access. There is a shortcut bar at the bottom of the home screen. The top is a notification panel that Android users will be familiar with. There's also a double row of customisable shortcuts. Swiping this bar to the top reveals the entire menu screen, and you can browse your apps by swiping to the left.

Despite having a capacitive touch screen, the phone wasn't always responsive – especially when it came to the keyboard. The phone has a standard Android keyboard, with a provision for the T9 dictionary. There's also a handwriting input method, which didn't recognise most words we traced out. Although the keyboard wasn't really cramped, in portrait mode, a lot of typing errors kept recurring – with the only saving grace being the T9 dictionary which substituted the right word most of the time.

Media

With regard to social networking, the phone was pretty standard. We set up our Gmail easily and got push notifications for any new email. The phone comes pre-loaded with Acer Social Jogger – an app that integrates your Facebook and Twitter accounts with the phone.

For your media files, there are the direct Android apps for Music and Gallery. Alternatively, you can use the Nemo Player that puts all your media together in one place.

The phone supports the Xvid video format, and we were able to try out various short videos and our test media standard Frost/Nixon. The phone scores on sharpness and clarity, however there was a bit of stagger when we hit the play button after pausing the movie. Although the phone has Dolby Mobile integration, sound levels weren't outstanding, so we'd advise using headphones if you plan to listen to music or watch a movie. That said, there are a bunch of music and video equaliser presets to choose from – and that really improves the sound quality.

The camera is a 5-megapixel unit with an integrated flash, and is capable of 720p HD video recording. The camera produces good results in daylight conditions, but despite an overly powerful flash, it produces really bad results in low lighting. We almost ended up blinding people with the flash, and the resultant over-exposure made faces look white-washed. You can adjust sharpness and saturation, and tweak the white balance and ISO, but there aren't any scene modes to choose from.

Performance

The phone runs a 800 Mhz processor, a small step down from the Acer Stream's 1Ghz processor. The phone frequently froze when we were running a heavy app, such as the camera and barcode scanner, but at other times worked perfectly. It's a bit of a hit and miss, and we think the phone could use a firmware update.

What we did have major problems with was the proximity sensor – even though the screen is supposed to switch off when you're on a call, it frequently turned on and put the person on hold, activated the loudspeaker, and on a few occasions even dialled another number!

Battery life was good – you get about a day's worth of juice with a couple of hours of cumulative talktime and SNS also being enabled. Adding Bluetooth and Wi-Fi might drain the charge a little more.

Our Verdict

The Acer Liquid Metal has a lot to offer, no doubt, and for its price it's quite a good deal. However there are some software issues that have been compromised on. Once Acer evens out the chinks, it could be a serious contender in the high-end smartphone segment.

Rs 20,500

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