Gadgetory

hey guys it's Branham in oven from pocketnow.com and in this video we're going to take a look at the software performance and battery life of the acer liquid s100 we're counting this as one of the cheaper or less expensive Android devices that you can buy unlocked right now it's about a hundred dollars cheaper than the google nexus one and it will give you 3g on AT&T in the US so we're going to talk about those three things in this video so you can help determine if this is a device that you want to get the first thing that we want to talk about which is kind of unique to this device are the system notifications on the top of the device pretty cool so we've got a new email notification missed call and over here on the right you can't see it when you plug in the device to charge you will get an illumination here you may be wondering why would you want to have the notifications on the top of the device and not say you know around the edges here well the way I look at it is if you're if you have the device in your pocket and you want to quickly know if you have an email you can kind of pull it up so that the top is exposed see oh I have a new email message and that way you can turn on your device and begin to action on it so pretty cool we haven't yet seen something like this on any really mobile device that we've tested so it's a it's a neat change to see so let's turn on the device and talk about the home screens and everything else that comes along with that let's zoom in on the screen and we can tap to unlock by doing the the menu button over here and we are already into the android interface this is running android 1.6 so it's not the newest which is android 2.1 as found on the google nexus one the screen as mentioned is wvga resolution which is the same resolution that you'll find on the google nexus one that's 800 down and 480 across which makes for a very crisp and clear picture you may not you may not be able to tell in the video but it looks quite nice it's not using AMOLED screen technology as the google nexus one but it's a standard backlit LCD TFT display and it is it is quite nice to the eye so let's talk about some of these home screen widgets that you can add to the acer liquid that make it a little bit different than the standard android device that you would get out there so over here on the Left we have something called a media manager which is quite cool it has to fit on its own android screen and what it allows you to do is filter through your pictures your music and it was loading there and your videos that you have on your storage card and so from here we can kind of flick through see a video that we want to watch and watch it there's a little picture of my dog and likewise we can go to the suit the music and we can tap on one of these and it launches into the the acer media player which is also quite nice you can hear the music playing go backwards or we can go back to photos and go into the photo gallery so here all the pictures I've taken and we can flick through although the animations aren't as nice as you would get on the google nexus one or even the iphone and we do have accelerometer support so we can go into landscape and slide to the right and slide to the left we don't have multi touch anywhere on the acer liquid unfortunately we can double tap that doesn't do it to zoom in so we have to go down here so not the most precise controls for zooming in unfortunately in pictures but the media manager is nice to have sort of sitting on its own home screen you do a lot with multimedia let's go over to the center and we just have some standard stuff your program shortcuts in analog clock to the right we have a really cool way to look at our web bookmarks so we can actually flick through and see little screen captures of all of my favorites so here's pocket now calm tapping on it will bring up the browser and it's in landscape right now so I'm going to portrait and the browser works quite fast it's not as fast as the nexus one probably because it doesn't have the 4 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor but as you can see it's loading quite fast and we can zoom out right now and we can move around on the screen we can zoom out again lack of multi-touch is kind of annoying and this is also annoying you get this kind of magnification glass instead of just being able to move down the page so a little bit of something to get used to when when using the web browser on the acer liquid it does a good job at re flowing the columns and moving around on a page is generally smooth and of course it's got pretty fast screen rotation too if you want to go into landscape so standard Android browser just without the multi-touch capability so let's delete this widget and add a few more so a tap and hold and I'll go to widgets and we can see what else we have from the selection analog clock calendar media player stuff we've seen so far media player is kind of unique to this device like I mentioned and that fills up its own home screen we have a special widget for for music and of course it goes right into G Android multimedia player and let me delete that ASA really hasn't added that many things they've added something called the Nemo player which is essentially what you just saw for the multimedia player but it looks a little bit nicer and right now it's going to find the music on the device and if you tap on the widget you're taken into the sort of Nemo media player which again brings together all of your different sort of media so music movies or videos and photos all into one screen a nice addition from Acer to help you manage your multimedia so let's trash that see what else we have in here picture frames standard to Android power control Road sync calendar search spinlet switch is a built-in social networking system for the for the acer liquid as if you need another social network and let's see what we have here some other things that I've added such as tweed droid and a touchdown calendar web player is just that list of bookmarks that I showed you a minute ago and of course we can also change the wallpapers this isn't unique to to the liquid we can swipe to the right and say okay we want that one looks pretty cool set wallpaper and here we have the new wallpaper of course we can also add shortcuts to do various things we can direct dial someone so one touch access to dial your you know the people that you call the most quick quick links to bookmarks and application shins and you know things that were sort of used to seeing in Android by now something that's really really neat about the acer liquid is the task manager that lets you switch applications of course android lets you multitask and you can access your recently used programs by tapping and holding the home button but look what acer is done they actually give you full screen previews of the programs that you recently use so you can see a little thumbnail of pocketnow.com up here and if i tap on that it will reload pocketnow.com in the browser if i open a bunch of other applications you're going to see this in full force so if i go to thuy droid and that loads let's go home i'm going to open up another application let's say camera there's the camera and go back home and let's open one more application let's open the say just open the settings menu and we go back home and tap and hold we'll get a list of all of these different programs that we've opened with a cool little full screen screen capture that allows you to see what you've done recently in that program a really really awesome way to multitask on the acer liquid something that you don't see too much on other android devices so let's talk about other things that are included on the acer liquid something that i kind of have a gripe with is if you look closely at the system notifications up here they're a little bit pixelated almost as if they're not optimized to the wvga screen they look like they came from a version of android that went on a lower resolution display and there are a few places throughout the operating system where you see these pics pixelated buttons that just don't appear clearer let's just open the program tray and here we get the standard android program tray and let's look at some of these applications we have something called a search settings which is a quick way to disable bluetooth or Wi-Fi turn on and off gps and switch between 2g and 3g and here's a quick way to access the brightness control we have alarm clock a lot of standard android stuff calculator calendar camcorder and by the way I'll play for you in a minute a video taken with the camcorder photo is quite good it's not amazing it's probably as good as the google nexus one which really doesn't take that good of a quality of pictures email Gmail Google Goggles a great little application and really that's it we have a YouTube player which is standard let's see how video playback is over the hsdpa connection right now on AT&T so it is loading and downloading data all right so I'll click on just the first one I see here and go into landscape and watch some video on the nice crisp 3.5 inch display so really what we're dealing with here for the most part is a standard Android installed with a few extra programs and widgets let's talk a bit about performance battery life and claw quality you already saw performance when I was tapping around opening many applications performance is very very good it's an extremely fast device that shows really no lag when you open up screens you can multitask really with ease and although it only has 256 megabytes of RAM which is about half of what the next one does it does a really good job at multitasking let's talk about call quality call Cody was quite good it's not as good as a device that you'll get probably right from AT&T but I was able to hear the party clear and they will able to hear me clear the speaker phone was actually quite outstanding probably better than the google nexus one with no really distortions even at loud volumes and finally battery life I'd compare the battery life of the acer liquid to the HTC hd2 so with heavy use you'll get about a day and a half or a day and a quarter without having to recharge the device which is quite good and it beats the heck out of the iphone which often can't get through an entire day without being recharged and i think that's in part to the 1350 milliamp hour battery which is a nice size and to the slightly underclocked this Qualcomm Snapdragon processor which I think helps to conserve on power just a little bit so at the end of the day I think that the acer liquid is a really good value it has great performance good battery life and good call quality the only caveat here is that the build quality isn't nearly as good as the google nexus one and it's also a lot of thicker than the google nexus one and certainly a lot of other slab devices out there but at a hundred dollars cheaper perhaps that doesn't matter to you and perhaps it's really advantageous for you to have AT&T 3g on an unlocked android device so again we recommend the acer liquid mostly because it's a good value and the price makes sense for a device of this type you can get an acer liquid of your own by going to klove co uk where they're shipping right now for about four hundred and fifty dollars that's it for now