Large screen, decent camera, good battery life, sensible price
Cheap casing, not the fastest
Taiwanese manufacturer Acer may not be the hippest name on the smartphone block but if it keeps producing decent-quality, budget-priced handsets like the Liquid S1, it could be.
It's on sale now for around £280.
Design
The Liquid S1 just about qualifies as a handset rather than a tablet. With its 5.7-inch screen, it's quite a handful, dominating the original Samsung Galaxy S4's mere 5 inches, though it's dwarfed by the
S4 Mega's 6.3 inches. Still, it's managed to keep the size down to a wafery 8mm deep, though the case quality feels a bit plasticky and cheap.
Our test version featured dual SIM slots, giving you the option to run two accounts at the same time. Handy if you want to keep work and life separate, or if you go abroad regularly and want to avoid roaming charges. It's available with both dual and single SIM options.
That 5.7-inch touchscreen offers an HD resolution of 1,280x720 pixels, which boils down to 258ppi -- pretty impressive really, and great for watching movies, though the screen could perhaps just be a touch more sensitive.
Android, software and performance
It's running the very latest 4.2.2 Jelly Bean version of Android, but unlike most smartphones, you won't notice much difference between this and the original Google version you'll find on the Nexus 4. Acer has left the user interface pretty much untouched with original Android icons and widgets intact.
There is one difference however. The new Float UI allows you to overly some apps over others, a bit like Sony's small apps innovation. So you can have the calculator, maps, camera or notes floating on top of whatever app you already have open. It's just these four at the moment, though Acer says it plans to add more soon. It's a neat idea, though it's a shame there's no way to resize the floating apps to suit your needs.
The quad-core processor is clocked at 1.5GHz and backed by 1GB RAM. It might just be the RAM that makes the difference since this certainly isn't one of the fastest phones we've come across. Our AnTuTu performance benchmark score was 15,465 -- way behind the top quad-core handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One.
Photography
The 8-megapixel camera includes autofocus and an LED flash, plus a few handy extras like HDR, continuous shot, smile detection and panorama view. Picture quality is pretty decent, with realistic colours and good levels of detail in good light -- despite the large F2.0 lens, quality seems to dissipate rapidly in low light conditions.
Acer extras include the AcerCloud, which offers unlimited free storage space online that you can access from the Liquid S1 or other devices.
There's only 8GB of memory on board, which doesn't seem like a lot these days, but you can add a microSD card to bump that up by a further 64GB.
The large 2,400mAh battery held up very well, delivering a good day and a half of heavy use.
Conclusion
The Acer Liquid S1 is quite a handful but it has an excellent HD screen and a pretty good camera too. With the latest flavour of Android and plenty of free online storage available via AcerCloud, it offers a credible alternative to the big names.
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Software: Google Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean
Processor: Quad-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A7
Memory slot: Yes
Display: 5.7in TFT LCD, 16m colours, 1,280x720 pixels
Connectivity: Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0
Ports: microUSB, 3.5mm headphone jack
Camera: 8 megapixel, autofocus; 2 megapixel front-facing camera
Video playback: MP4, H.264, H.263
Audio playback: MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC
Radio: No
Battery: 2,400mAh
Size: 162x83x8mm
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
