The Acer Liquid A1 – Towering Above Android Phones

Taiwan-based computer-now-mobile phone-maker Acer seemed so confident about the performance of its first Android smartphone that it didn’t mind underclocking the powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processor from 1GHz to just 768 MHz.

It may have disappointed Android fans but its new Acer Liquid A1 is every inch one of the most powerful Android smartphones short of the Motorola Droid that has fashionable pretensions that work. Stability or even squeezing out the battery performance on so thin a handset may have prompted Acer to do just that, we can only guess.

But to see and use is to believe.  It is now out in the market and its features just confirm the leaked technical data we’ve seen over the last few months.  It is a formidable smartphone that despite all its remarkable goodies comes with a very appealing price initially published at €380 ($570) before taxes and subsidies.  But it now hovers slightly lower than that in the ?330 ($540) price point.

Top Act Features

As the world first Snapdragon Android smartphone and the world’s first Android 1.6 in wide-VGA (800×480) high definition screen, the Liquid ‘s 3.5” capacitive touchscreen figure quite dominantly on its futuristic slim body just 12.5mm thick and weighing just 135g.

There are no protruding tactile keys on the face as all navigating buttons are touch sensitive flushed contiguously level with the screen.  The handset exudes elegant simplicity in its fluid form and comes in three colors of your choice: black red and white.

This is a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G and a tri-band 3G/UMTS with HSDPA data connectivity for up to 7.2 Mbps assuring a high speed internet browsing experience. Local data connectivity is supported by its WiFi 802.11b/g for hotspot internet surfing as well as Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR for wireless data transfers and synchronization with Bluetooth devices. Acer takes these features a step further allowing you to synchronize select desktop or laptop media contents with the handset over both WiFi and Bluetooth.

Talk about synchronization, the Liquid can have your address book contacts, calendar and email contents synced with social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.  You can also upload your photos to Picasa and your videos to YouTube.  This makes Google’s online media services act as a virtual remote storage backup for any and all your media content.

You can expect excellent imaging feature with a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and geo-tagging courtesy of its built-in GPS receiver. On top of its capable multimedia players, the Liquid A1 comes with what Acer calls Spinlets, special phone apps that enable free audio and video content streaming that you can share with friends, family and colleagues over the web or email.

You get two choices in listening to your audio files.  You can use wireless stereo earphones with its Bluetooth 2.1 A2DP support or use regular high fidelity headphones using its 3.5mm AV jack.

Some Complaints

Its slim 1350 lithium-ion battery when fully charged can only go to 5 hours of talk time and about 17 days in standby mode – a bit short compared with other touchscreen smartphones in this class.  We figure if Acer hadn’t underclocked the Snapdragon CPU, there’d be shorter talk times. The Acer Liquid A1 runs on the Android 1,6 Donut platform but we hope to see it upgraded to the latest version 2.0 codenamed Éclair that now runs the Motorola Droid.

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