Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the hardware tour of the acer liquid s 100 this is one of the more affordable unlocked android options compared to the nexus one it's about $100 cheaper and it will allow you to get 3G in the US for using AT&T the Nexus One will only give you three G if you're running on t-mobile so let's talk a little bit about specs before talking about actually the hardware on the device that's running on android 1.6 not 2.1 like the Nexus 1 it's a quad-band GSM phone with tri-band UMTS it also has HSDPA and HSUPA meaning you can get even faster download and upload speeds if the network supports it it's got a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor though it's only clocking at 768 megahertz which is still quite fast and will result in really fast device performance the Nexus One clocks in at 1 gigahertz odd is 512 megabytes of rom with 256 megabytes of RAM the display is the same size as the iPhone it's 3.5 inches diagonal with WVGA resolution so it's 800 down and 480 across the screen is made out of glass it is capacitive but you can't use multi-touch on the acer liquid unfortunately it has a 5 megapixel camera on the back with autofocus it is a GPS wife Wi-Fi bng bluetooth 2.0 and it has microSD expansion if you want to add more memory so let's take a look at the hardware we'll zoom in a little bit to the device has a really interesting design with this white border apparently the liquid will come in red and in black I haven't seen it in red only in black but what's really nice is you get this outline of whatever color you get the device in around the whole device which is quite quite nice so up here we have this speaker grille and up here also there's a proximity sensor but no light sensor at least so you can't have the device automatically regulate the screen brightness down here we have some kind of cryptic buttons that are quite different than the standard Android buttons so you could probably figure this out this one's home although why don't they just use a house then we have search back and the menu button which looks a little bit different than the menu button that were used to on other Android devices the front is completely flush and it's very nice it seems to have an anti grease coating on it I've been using this for about a day and really the screen is kept quite clean as I mentioned the screen is glass it is capacitive the device is actually quite thick and when we unbox it we thought that maybe it's not so thick but it really does have a lot of a lot of thickness to it it's about twelve point seven five millimeters that's about two millimeters thicker than the Nexus One and the iPhone over here on the Left we have a standby button so if we tap on that it will unlock the device and we can put it back to sleep on the bottom we have a kind of this black strip that does pick up fingerprints and we also have a microphone over here and it uses mini USB for syncing and charging not micro USB like a lot of the newer devices coming out over on the other side we have a dual action camera button for the five megapixel camera and then we have a volume up and down rocker and all these buttons are adorned and have a nice silvery color that doesn't pick up fingerprints on the top we have 3.5 millimeter for audio which is quite nice on the back which is covered within this glossy white coating we have the 5 megapixel camera with no flash unfortunately the Nexus One does up a flash then we have a speaker grille for the speakerphone and for the the the external speaker which does a really nice job at projecting volume and we can take off the back battery cover but actually pulling outward like so and we have the SIM card slot here micro sd and the battery which is of size about thirteen hundred and fifty mili amp hours and we're going to talk about battery life shortly so overall while we liked the design on the acer liquid with this white bezel and the very flush touchscreen here the the hardware feels a little bit cheap and we've tested a lot of Acer devices over the years and this has been a theme with all Acer devices the build quality is just not there compared to HTC or Motorola or any of the other devices that they compete against that said usually acer has a lower price point than the other devices which kind of makes it a good value if you can compare it to what is out there we've got a lot more coming up on the acer liquid we're going to talk about the software that's on the device we'll talk about battery life and performance that's it for now