Acer Liquid Metal - Going with the Flow

Overview & Design

While Acer had quite a blast riding on the Android wave with a couple of handsets released mid last year, they have been relatively quiet compared to the likes of Android-lovin' giants like HTC or Samsung. Making somewhat of a comeback with the new Liquid Metal,  Acer is set to face some strong competition from existing players. How will this mid-range Android device fare? That's what we're going to share today.

The Acer Liquid Metal has a slightly curved body - both back and front. Because of that, the phone cannot rest properly on a flat surface. Additionally, because of this curvaceous aspect, the smartphone isn’t as dainty and slim as what we are mostly used to. To add on, its raised screen makes it slightly too thick for comfortable handling.

Design-wise, it follows somewhat closely to its , boasting of similar physical features, including streamlined aesthetics with sparse and simple icons representing home, search, back and main menu options as touch controls. The phone is predominantly black with silver finishings and a brown chrome back cover. One thing we disliked about its appearance is that it is glossy all over, practically making it a fingerprint magnet from top to bottom.

Just like the Acer Liquid, the top edge also houses a trio of status LEDs that glows when there are incoming notifications - a battery status light flashes when the battery is charging and glows white when it's full; an envelope icon pulses to indicate unread messages; and a white arrow symbol flashes to indicate an incoming call or missed call.

Phone Features

Unlike its predecessor, the Liquid, the new Liquid Metal operates on a fairly recent version of the Android OS (2.2). As we recall, the old Liquid came with the Android 1.6 OS, with an option to upgrade it to Eclair (version 2.0). Additionally, the Acer Liquid Metal works on an unique premise - users have the option of toggling between the customized Acer UI (otherwise known as Breeze UI) and the staple Android UI under the Settings menu. Basically, you get more in one phone, but the sad situation is, the former isn't exactly intuitive even though it has a clean and refined look. Those who are used to the Android UI or the HTC Sense UI might be scratching their heads over the fact that a) task/notifications bar has been relegated to the middle of the screen, and b) these notifications are spread across several tabs as opposed to a single drag-down menu. 

Awakening your phone from locked mode prompts up an interface of five pages. Out of those, four are available for you to load it with widgets (just like the original Android or Sense UI) but no shortcuts or folders. Oddly though, the phone allows users to view personal information that you or anyone can access even while the phone is locked! As seen in the screenshot below, even when the phone is locked, personal status and other information is viewable, including browsing through the five pages of the Breeze UI. While it's sort of convenient, we really question the practicality of it since anyone can see personal or vital information without even unlocking the phone. Thankfully the Android default UI doesn't have this 'feature'.

We personally feel that it's a love or hate affair with regards to the Breeze UI. It takes getting used to but it has some plus points like easy access to phone history and multimedia activity, but ultimately, it is a step down from the basic Android UI in terms of general usability.

The Android Way

The Acer Liquid Metal doesn't really stand out in any way in terms of performance. Surfing on the smartphone yielded no problems; generally, the user experience was smooth and receptive on its 3.6-inch touchscreen. Throughout our duration of handling the phone, it never lagged or crashed once. We attribute the smoothness and lag-free experience to its Qualcomm 7230 800MHz processor, one based on the Snapdragon core. The typing experience is typically run-of-the-mill here - i.e., we had no major complaints typing on the stock Android keyboard; the average 3.6-inch touchscreen gave enough allowance for an almost error-less affair.

Its 800 x 480 pixels resolution also ensured that the video playback experience on the phone was decent. Audio was relatively decent with Dolby Mobile switched on, sporting punchier bass and vocals.The Liquid Metal's camera capabilities seemed to have improved from the Liquid - previously, we mentioned that autofocusing took at least 5 seconds or more, but on the Liquid Metal, it was relatively speedy (2 seconds max). The only downside is that, based on our experience with other handsets, its processing speed is still marginally slower. 

As expected of mid-range smartphones, a 5-megapixel camera is equipped at its rear with an accompanying LED flash. We ran some standard tests on the camera for a rough gauge of its performance.

The 5-megapixel camera exhibited a decent level of sharpness and details, but doesn't perform as well in terms of color production and white balance. Colors were whitewashed, and turned out cool, pointing to obvious white balance issues. Nonetheless, it showed visible improvement over the old Liquid's photo taking capabilities.

As usual, we compare the Acer Liquid Metal's battery performance with a selected group of devices chosen based on their similarities across battery capacities, display sizes, resolution and processing power. This standard battery test consists of looping a 240 x 320 pixels resolution video clip at 100% volume and screen brightness, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth active with push email or data being pulled at regular intervals. For the Acer Liquid Metal, we compared it against similar Android devices such as the original Acer Liquid, HTC Desire and Nexus One. Results after the specs comparison list below:-

The Acer Liquid Metal had a good battery mileage going, clocking in at almost eight hours of usage on the battery test. While using it for normal day-to-day operations, the phone could easily last for at least one full day; with minimal usage, you can easily stretch it by half a day more. Compared to the other smartphones in its category, the Liquid Metal definitely scored points for its lasting battery life - noticeably beating the Liquid by a mile in terms of battery life. However, do take note that it has the highest battery charge amongst all the smartphones. Regardless, it still runs for more efficient compared to even higher-end smartphones with 1500mAh batteries. Looks like the newer OS and the late entry to the scene allowed Acer to tweak the performance aspects of the phone.

The Verdict

The Liquid Metal is decidedly a decent all-round smartphone which sports a decent screen size, adequate processing power, reasonable audio/multimedia capabilities and high battery mileage . We weren't such big fans of its bulky and fingerprint-crazy exterior, but what really takes the cake is its counter-productive Breeze UI. While it was a valiant attempt to position itself differently from the existing horde of Android phones, it actually complicates the user interface. Thankfully, there's the option to switch to the basic Android UI. It is also worthy to mention that the Acer Liquid Metal comes with some novelty status LEDs like its Liquid predecessor, which gives the mobile phone an interesting edge over others. While it doesn't bring anything substantially new to the plate (been there, done that syndrome), at S$599, the Liquid Metal does come with an attractive price that outweighs its cons.

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