Acer Liquid - Smooth Moves
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Design
Fluid Layout
Over the months, we've seen a variety of Android phones, and not too many were able to impress us with its aesthetics. The Liquid, however, differs from the norm. A hint of black is only found on the top, bottom and front of the device, with a pure white hue covering the rest of the device. Buttons are minimal on the Liquid, with only the Power button on the left, followed by the Volume and Camera buttons on the right. The curved outline of the Liquid looks great, but herein lays the problem.
With the buttons fully flushed to the body, the curved body made it hard for us to find the buttons. Further to that, when we attempted to take a picture with the 5-megapixel camera, we had a hard time to half-press the camera button for auto-focussing. Below the 3.5-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen lies four touch sensitive 'buttons', which link to the Home, Search, Back and Menu pages. Thankfully, the 'buttons' had the right amount of sensitivity, which didn't require much effort, nor gave us problems for being overly sensitive.
Besides the usual notifications found within the interface, the Liquid adds on three separate LEDs. These LEDs provide notifications for incoming messages, calls, and the battery level of the Liquid. Practical as it is to let you know of any incoming messages or calls, you'll have to position the top of the phone to be constantly in your line of sight to take full advantage of the LED nofitications.
With more devices adopting the micro USB standard, it's surprising to see the Liquid sporting a mini USB port instead. What got us a little disappointed is the dangling plastic cover for the said port, which sometimes hinders us from properly plugging in the USB cable. What didn't come as a surprise was the presence of a 3.5mm audio port at the top of the device.
The external aesthetic value is high, but as soon as we remove the battery casing (by inserting our finger into the corner and prying it open), we spotted an issue. While we normally do switch off the phone to remove the SIM card, it isn't so for microSD cards. Unfortunately, the Liquid requires you to extract the battery before you can reach the microSD card. Granted this isn't exactly a big issue, but we would have preferred to have the option of swapping cards without having to shut down and power on the phone again.
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