Acer Liquid Mobile Phone

Of course there’s plenty of social networking opportunity as your contacts database can sync with your Facebook and other accounts. The integration isn’t as well laid out as HTC’s versions but it’s still workable. Uploading images etc. to your various accounts is also quite simple and since it’s Android, any chat application that isn’t preloaded can be downloaded off the Android Market. Acer has preloaded a ‘UrFooz’ social networking application for Liquid customers. It’s relatively new but quite a bit of fun to use. It allows you to create an avatar right on the handset and use it in your profile for all your social networking accounts, blog etc. Everything is integrated into this one simple and fun to use interface which can also be attached as a widget to a desktop.

Through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth the handset also allows for media streaming through a Media Server app. Bluetooth also supports A2DP. A YouTube app is also present. RoadSync for backing up data and RoadSync email apps are also preloaded. For its GPS module it uses the latest version of Google Maps with ‘Latitude’, Buzz and layer integration. A-GPS helps speed up the process for getting as much real -time information for chatting etc. 

Misc. Features
Like any other normal handset all the basic are covered. Those include a calendar to keep appointments and schedules, calculator, Alarm clock, tasks, Voice recorder etc. The extras thrown in by default include a ‘read-only’ version of Documents to Go with a PDF reader as well,  Speech Synthesis for Text-to-Speech and Acer Sync for Google and other options. Obviously there’s plenty more where that came from via the Android Market.

Camera
The 5 megapixel camera loaded onto the Liquid is sans flash. Its feature set includes White Balance, GeoTagging, ISO levels (up 800) and a self timer. When it comes to images, the picture quality is not bad at all. The camera seemed to have one very major glitch in functionality - it only focused on the lower portion of every frame while blurring out the rest. This was consistent throughout my testing. The portion that appeared focused was clear as ever though, but that's not nearly good enough a reason to absolve the Liquid's camera faux pas. Indoor shots in artificial lights didn't seem to have this problem though. Another issue is that it takes too long to save images and even longer to geotag locations onto them.

Battery
Acer estimates that the Liquid should dish out about 5 hours of talk time thanks to its 1350 mAh Li-ion Polymer battery. In reality it will offer you about 4 hours and about 10 minutes. That’s still really good.

The Bottom Line
The Acer Liquid Android Mobile comes with a price tag of Rs. 24,900 (MRP) (package includes a 2GB memory card). That’s actually a very reasonable price. It has quite a bit to offer in terms of connectivity for emails and social networking. The handset’s media capabilities are also quite good from the music player to the 5MP camera. The Liquid does have its drawbacks but on the whole it’s a good handset for the price. It may not be the cheapest Android handset on the market but it’s certainly one of the better options in its range.