Times move quickly in the smartphone world. At the end of last year Acer launched the Liquid, its first Android based handset. Since then things have moved very swiftly indeed, and Acer now has quite an array of Android handsets in its portfolio.

But there is obviously still some pulling power in the physical design of the Liquid, because Acer has recently revamped it as the Liquid E. Physically the new handset is identical to its predecessor. The attractive black and white colour scheme remains, as do the indicator lights on the top edge of the chassis which light up to indicate a message or a missed call.

The handset is overall a little bit large at 115 x 64 x 12.75mm, and those with smaller hands may find it a bit unwieldy to hold, and have trouble reaching right across the screen for one-handed use. But the trade-off is a sizeable 3.5-inch screen whose 800 x 480 pixels are sharp, bright and clear. This is a great phone for web browsing or using multimedia.

The Acer Liquid E runs Android 2.1. The original Liquid could only manage Android 1.6 but this upgrade, the main one that differentiates the Liquid E from the original Liquid, adds in things like Exchange email support and an improved web browser.

Acer doesn't always get its skinning of operating systems right, and in this case the decision has been made to leave well alone, so that you see pretty much plain vanilla Android.

With five home screens on offer you can readily pepper widgets and shortcuts around the place to your heart's content, and Acer does add two widgets of its own in the shape of large carousels for media and web bookmarks.

The usual Android necessities of HSDPA support, Wi-Fi and GPS are present, and the large, multitouch supporting capacitive screen is comfortable to use for text entry in either wide or tall screened modes.

The camera is a little disappointing. While it shoots stills at 5-megapixels it lacks a flash. Photos taken outdoors are good enough but not great, while indoors the amount of ambient light will affect how usable photos are.

It is an oddity that while the Acer Liquid E carries a 1GHz processor, this is actually underclocked to 768Mhz. We didn't notice any negative effects on performance as a result, though, and the underclocking probably helps with battery life, which is better than the average.

Verdict
The Acer Liquid E is a solid Android smartphone. Pretty much unskinned, it lets you get to Android in its native state, plus there is a large screen, good battery life and some neat tweaks such as those top-mounted alert lights.

Company: Acer

Contact: 01202 552936

Tags: android wi-fi acer liquid a1 global positioning system high-speed downlink packet access gps digital living network alliance random-access memory