The Acer Liquid E2 is a really good smartphone, Acer have come out with a stylish handset that will not disappoint you showing it off to your friends and family.
Before we get down to the actual review let us give you the specifications:
Fast 8 megapixel camera with instant shutter and HD video
Dual stereo speakers with DTS sound
Large 4.5-inch display
Daydream function that turns the screen into a digital photo frame
Android OS : v4.2.1 (Jelly Bean)
SD card slot: microSD, up to 32GB
Internal memory: 4GB, 1GB RAM
Battery life: Standby: 450 Hours, Talk Time: 540 Minutes
Camera: Resolution: 8MP
Size/Weight: Depth: 10mm, Height: 131mm, Width: 68mm, Screen: 4.5inches, Weight: 140g
Connectivity: Bluetooth
Network: HSDPA, Band: Quad,
Features: FM Radio, GPS, Music Player, Video Calls, Video Player, OS: Android JellyBean
Memory: Phone Memory: 4GB, Card Max. Size: 32GB
Messaging: Email
The Acer Liquid E2 also features an instant shutter so you never miss the perfect picture and dual stereo speakers with DTS sound, which turns it into a great little portable stereo. Its large 4.5” screen is ideal for eBay window shopping or even playing the latest games, such as Minion Rush, following this summer’s blockbuster film. When it’s not in use you can use the phone’s Daydream function to turn the screen into a digital photo frame.
The Acer Liquid E2 is a mid-range smartphone with a 1.2 GHz quad-core processor – normally, you’d only get a dual-core processor. As you’d expect it comes pre-loaded with Android Jelly Bean (4.2) and has a 4.5 inch touch-screen (960*540 pixels).
Another major strength of the smartphone is it’s 8 mega-pixel camera which can record full 1080p videos. While, it has 1GB of RAM and 4GB of onboard memory, which can be expanded using a 32GB microSD cards.
The one other bit of design trim is a spot of red up by where your ear sits when taking calls. Thankfully, it’s much subtler than the grilles.
Acer Liquid E2 – Design
This is a phone that does try to separate itself from the pack looks-wise, and to a certain extent it works.
Rather than using an eye-catching finish or a metal body, the Acer Liquid E2’s look is defined by the two speaker grilles on its rear and a Aluminium strip around the side. They’re the first thing you notice, as the designer must have been looking at the plughole in the sink to get some inspiration, as that’s just what they look like.
We get it, Acer, you’re trying to tell us the phone has above-average speakers. .
From a more practical perspective, the Acer Liquid E2’s design does matter a great deal. The speakers don’t spoil the phone’s ergonomics, and handling is perfectly fine. At 10mm thick it’s no supermodel slim, but the soft touch plastic battery cover feels nice and smooth on the fingers. It’s not too heavy either, at 140g.
Average height, average weight, the Acer Liquid E2 is no beauty. But with a mid-size 4.5-inch screen, its power and volume rocker buttons are small enough to reach comfortably one-handed and, front-on at least, its looks are decent. It also has a neat little green/red notification light in the screen surround and light-up soft keys.
Under its removable battery cover is a full-size SIM slot and the microSD memory card slot. With only 4GB of internal memory, a memory card is a must if you want to store music or videos, unless you’re using some cloud storage. There’s also a dual-SIM version of the E2, although we’re doubtful if it will be seen in the UK.
Acer Liquid E2 – Connectivity
Aside from these slots under the hood, and the headphone jack/microUSB on the phone’s outside, all the Liquid E2’s connections are wireless. And, as you might guess, there’s nothing too advanced going on.
The Acer Liquid E2 does not have 4G or NFC, the two most important recent-ish additions to the spec sheets of mobile phone connections. It does have everything else, though: Bluetooth, GPS, HSPA 3G and Wi-Fi.
Acer Liquid E2 – Screen
The Acer Liquid E2 has a 4.5-inch screen, a step or two below the 5-inch and near-5-inch top-end mobiles of the year, such as the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4.
Although not hugely dissimilar in size, there is quite a gap in screen quality. The Acer Liquid E2 uses an IPS panel, the type of screen used in most higher-end tablets and phones.
Its viewing angles are great – the main design goal behind this type of screen – and image quality is decent. However, there are compromises.
The screen doesn’t have the advanced anti-reflective coating seen in pricier phones, and as such the base ‘black’ of the screen is grey-ish in normal indoors lighting, spoiling the contrast of images. Resolution is fairly low, too. The Acer Liquid E2’s display is 960 x 540 pixels, resulting in pixel density of 245 ppi. That’s a respectable low-to-mid range figure, and it doesn’t leave normal-sized text looking blocky, but it lacks the pristine clarity you’d get with a 720p or 1080p display.
Acer Liquid E2 – Software
Acer has made only very slight changes to the Android 4.2.1 software of the Liquid E2. The icon dock on the home screen, the lock screen and even the power off animation are stock.
Keeping things simple like this helps to make the Acer Liquid E2 perform well day-to-day, despite ‘only’ having 1GB of RAM. The 2013 standard for a top-end phone is 2GB of RAM.
There’s barely any lag when flicking through Android. Apps load a teeny bit slower than they would on a £500 phone, but this too is minor if you have even the smallest reserve of patience.
Alongside the 1GB of RAM, the Acer Liquid E2 has a quad-core Mediatek processor. This CPU brand is generally seen in aggressively priced phones and tablets, and the E2’s is a quad-core Cortex A7 chipset clocked at 1.2GHz that uses the PowerVR SGX 544 MP GPU.
There are a few minor app additions, but most of them aren’t actually Acer’s own software. There’s an AcerCloud app, which gives you access to Acer’s Cloud storage once you register for it, but otherwise there’s no sign of that Acer logo. Instead, Acer pre-installs a few generic utilities, such as a to-do list, a backup app, barcode scanner and file browser. More unusually, there’s an app to help you hook up to a wireless keyboard or mouse. But as it’s little more than a Bluetooth sync interface it feels a little pointless.
Acer knows that most of you will want to skip off to Google Play to find your favourite apps upon firing-up the Acer Liquid E2, and it just lets you get on with it.
Acer Liquid E2 – Keyboard and Browsing
One of the most important changes to the Android OS is one you may not notice instantly. The Acer Liquid E2 uses a custom keyboard rather than the stock Android one.
It uses the Swype keyboard, which lets you drag a path across the letters in a word rather than having to tap them separately. Swype is a good keyboard, and offers snappy typing, especially if you embrace its gesture-led style.
It has multiple ‘themes’ too – skins that change how the keyboard looks.
The browser selection is the Android default – the ‘stock’ Android browser and the snappier Chrome. For a larger-screen phone like the Liquid E2, we prefer Chrome (although it doesn’t support text reflow).
Acer Liquid E2 – Music, Video and Internal Speaker
With the most obvious speakers this side of the Ministry of Sound and a DTS logo on the phone’s back, you’d assume that a focus of the Liquid E2 is music/video. However, in action it’s revealed to be mostly bluster. The music app is the bog-standard Android one, and the quality of the internal speakers is seriously disappointing.
They’re not particularly loud, they are tonally mediocre and they distort at top volume. These are clearly pretty low-grade speakers. There are just two of them for a spot of stereo effect, but even that isn’t particularly impressive as the speakers are rear-mounted and fire directly away from you.
The Acer Liquid E2’s video is better. The video player app played most of our test files with no problems, including DivX and MKV. Although Windows warns you that files may not be compatible with the Acer Liquid E2 virtually no matter what type you try (when ferrying them over a USB cable), it handles more than most.
Acer Liquid E2 – Camera
The Liquid E2 uses an 8-megapixel main camera and a two-megapixel secondary one. It has a decent spread of fun and creative modes too, without making the camera app at all tricky to use.
Along the left-hand side of the camera app is a thin scrolling menu of modes. Aside from fairly common modes, like Beauty Shot and auto-shutter Face Recognition, there’s HDR, Panorama and Multi View. The last is the most unusual, letting you take a take multiple shots moving around an object – then viewed like a digital flipbook.
Performance and image quality is patchy in parts. In daylight, the Liquid E2 captures evenly-exposed, natural-looking images with a good amount of detail – rivalling the iPhone 5. However, the camera isn’t clever enough to be truly successful.
Its autofocus is generally quick, but often mis-reports focusing when shooting objects close-up. Its macro skills aren’t particularly strong, and we ended up with out of focus shots even when the camera app suggested the Liquid E2 had achieved a solid lock-on.
The foibles continue in low-light shooting. The phone has an LED flash, but it’s not used as a focusing aid, so any poorly lit object remotely close to the phone will be very blurry. These are software issues that could have been avoided with a little more fine-tuning.
Acer Liquid E2 – Battery Life and Call Quality
The Acer Liquid E2 has a 2,000mAh battery. Stamina is more-or-less standard for an Android phone of this size – it’ll last for a day and a half with light use, but most will need to charge the phone each and every day. When on charge the screen defaults to show the time which is a nice touch.
Call quality is Okay on the three network, with a slight lack of top-end clarity and top volume output from the earpiece speaker is good. However, like most phones these days it does employ a second microphone to reduce noise in the signal from your end of the call.
Should I Buy the Acer Liquid E2?
The Acer Liquid E2 tries to mark itself out as something other than a bog-standard Android phone, with its dual rear speakers and its option for dual SIMs. However, as its speakers aren’t worth praising, these selling points are not strong.
It’s a reasonably powerful phone, but it’s trying to compete against this years high-end phones, more of the mid-ranged ones.
It all comes down to price, now, when you consider you can buy it for £150.00, at that price it’s distinctly more capable than anything you could buy, including Samsung. However, it’s nowhere near as stylish or neat as something like the HTC One, and some will easily be swayed by body-work, even if the Acer does offer a solid array of specs per pound.
If you can stretch to a Google Nexus 4, though, we recommend doing so. It has a more powerful processor, a superior screen and much more attractive bodywork.
Verdict
The Acer Liquid E2 is a solid but standard/mid-ranged Android phone. Its stand-out design point – the speaker grilles and aluminum banding – are eye-catching. Sound quality is nothing special but, decent. If you don’t mind the looks and just want a competent, well-priced Android device, though, then E2 supplies the goods.
Sylvia Chind, head of devices at Three, said:
“The Liquid E2 is the first smartphone from Acer that we are offering to our customers. This device provides a rich, Android experience and a quad core processor that will give you the performance you need to enjoy the reliability and speed of our network.”
Scores In Detail
Camera Quality: 8/10
Design: 6/10
Features: 7/10
Performance: 8/10
Screen Quality: 8/10
Value: 8/10
Pros
Decent performance
Good camera
Near-vanilla Android software
Cons
Disappointingly poor speaker performance
To get all the latest phone reviews, news and features beamed straight to your Android device of choice, head to the Google Play store and download the free BeginnerTech Android app today, by click our icon below. To use the QR code you will need a Barcode scanner, app from the play store, then click the QR code. Or you can you can add us to your circle on Google+, follow us on Twitter or, like us on Facebook. Download our app for the latest news.
The post Hands-on review – Acer Liquid E2 appeared first on BeginnersTech.
