Acer Liquid S1 Review

Introduction

The phablet category is getting quite the love from phone makers this season, and Acer is throwing a horse in the race with the Liquid S1, too, following in the footsteps of companies like Sony or Huawei, which also made their first phablets this year.

Its specs are decidedly in the lower midrange category, with an HD screen and a MediaTek processor, but Acer made available a dual SIM version of the S1, in the hope it will attract some more big-screen phone fans to an otherwise run-of-the-mill plastic 5.7-incher. Did Acer succeed with its first phablet, or next time will be the charm? Read on to find out...

In the box

• In-ear stereo headphones
• Spare back cover (white)
• Wall charger
• microUSB cable
• Warranty and information leaflets

Design

We don't want to rain on your parade, but despite the all-plastic shell and the same screen size, a Note 3 the Acer Liquid S1 is not. The thick bezel, shoddy plastic used all-around, and the unusually heavy 6.88 oz (195 g) build hint that Acer isn't pulling all stops with this device, but rather just testing the phablet waters, and its ability to swim there.

The plastic chassis gives the phone a cheapo feel, as the back cover is not even soft-touch or polycarbonate, and the side rim has two silver strips that are supposed to imitate metal, but fall far short. The physical keys that are raised above those strips are still too flush with the sides to be comfortable found and pressed without looking, and have a flimsy feel to them, as well as a very shallow feedback.

The curved back helps somewhat with handling, but the handset is so big that one-handed operation is still out of the question. Since Acer isn't providing thumb-friendly options to shrink the dialer or keyboard left or right, you have to use both hands with the Liquid S1 the vast majority of the time.

You can access the two micro SIM card slots by prying off the back cover and taking out the battery. This gives you access to three slots that are just above the battery compartment – two for the SIM cards and one microSD slot for adding storage. There is one extra back cover in white color provided in the box, should you get bored of the all-black looks, but since the sides and front will stay black, it's not a pretty sight.

Display

We get a 5.7” 720x1280 pixels LCD display on the Liquid S1 with 258ppi pixel density, and this panel is nothing to write home about. Colors are too warm and somewhat pale, shifting with the slightest tilt of the phone, along with brightness, which indicates poor viewing angles.

The black levels are not as deep as on even average LCD screens, not to mention the OLED ones, so black actually looks grayish, diminishing the contrast number. This, together with the below average brightness level, makes the Liquid S1 panel troubling for outdoor usage, especially in bright sunlight.

Interface and functionality

Acer's phablet runs almost stock Android 4.2.2, with a few preinstalled apps thrown in for a good measure, like Acer Cloud, Acer Print or Auto Profile. The devil is in the details, though, as the company offers what it calls Float UI on the Liquid S1. Long-press the capacitive task key underneath the display, and you will get shortcuts to eight apps of your choosing, as well as a dock with four apps at the bottom you can “float” on top of every other screen you are working with at the moment.

These floating windows include the notes, calculator, maps and camera apps, and you can have all four of them open at once in transparent, resizable windows that stack on top of each other, for some added multitasking ability.

Acer has Swype keyboard preinstalled on the Liquid S1, so you can write with just tracing your finger across the keys, and it works like charm in numerous languages. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be one-handed option for the keyboard, so that it scooches left or right on the huge display, giving you the opportunity to use one hand and its thumb for typing, instead of having to use both. Same goes for the dialer, and is an omission on phablets, along with the lack of landscape mode for the interface – another thing Acer doesn't offer on the Liquid S1.

Processor and memory

A quad-core 1.5 GHz MediaTek MTK 6589 chipset with PowerVR SGX 544MP GPU is what makes the phablet tick, and this silicon has shown its weakness in many handsets already. Sporting four frugal, but not powerful Cortex-A7 cores, MediaTek's creation is responsible for laggy interface, blurred scrolling, and choppy 3D games performance, while the 1 GB of RAM adds some slow app loading times and unimpressive multitasking abilities.

The Liquid S1 offers 8 GB of internal memory, of which only 4.5 GB are user-available, but you get an accessible memory card slot for expansion, so no complaints.

Internet and connectivity

The default mobile Chrome browser behaves surprisingly well in rendering, panning and scrolling, considering the lousy chipset. This, however, is achieved by not rendering the page in real time, rather blurring it during the motion, then rendering it only after you stop moving your fingers. Text reflow works well, though, and since we have a 5.7” HD display... well, how bad can mobile browsing be on such a large screen real estate to begin with.


Acer Liquid S1 flaunts support for European/Asian networks and HSPA+ data download speeds. It also offers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, FM Radio and that's that - a pretty basic set of wireless connectivity options.

Camera

The 8 MP snapper on the back of the phablet sports an adjacent LED flash, while the phone also flaunts a wide 88 degree angle front camera that can fit more faces in your video chat frame. The camera app interface is with a few shooting modes like HDR or Panorama, and color effects you can apply to your photo or video. Shot-to-shot times are almost instant, which can't be said for the camera app loading duration, as it takes two or three seconds before you actually enter it from the lock screen, for example.

Outdoors the phone produces acceptable, albeit softish photos, with colors slightly overblown. There are no white balance hiccups, but we get slight underxposure of photos in normal mode, which come out darker than what's in front of the lens in reality. Using the HDR mode will remedy this, though saving the photos will be slower.


The camera focus is rather sluggish and jittery, so you have to hold the handset extremely steady and your objects shouldn't be moving at all for a non-blurred shot, especially indoors. When the light starts to dwindle, noise creeps into the pictures way more than it should, and we often get very blurry results.

Video is captured in 1080p resolution with fluid 30fps, but goes underexposed and darker than it should be in reality, just like the stills.

Multimedia

The stock Android Gallery and Play Music app are taking care of the visual and audible delights on the phone. There are photo editing functions built into the gallery interface, and you get a bunch of equalizer presets with the music player, so the basics are taken care of, though the interfaces are not as pretty as on some 3rd party apps.

The loudspeaker is strong enough, housed in the handset's chunky body, but sounding harsh and relatively thin, with no distinct bass to speak of. Acer also offers a DTS surround sound mode in the settings, which in our opinion should be always on, as the sound without it comes out even flatter.

The default video player runs MKV and Xvid files up to 1080p resolution without a problem, but DivX licenses are a no-go, so you need to get a 3rd party app from the Play Store for that. The stock player is rather basic anyway, with only an added loop function for the vids, and no extra options present.

Call quality

The earpiece of the phablet is loud enough, but the voice quality in it is rather low, with hollow sounding and distorted voices. On the receiving end the situation is rather similar – our chat buddy could hear us with decent strength, but the microphone picked and relayed our voice unnaturally, and with hissing sounds.

Battery

A 2400 mAh battery is no match for the latest flagship phablets which start you off near the 3000 mAh mark, and is more akin to something with smaller display. The screen is not that resolute, though, and the chipset is frugal, if not powerful, so the Liquid S1 does fairly well in battery-draining. Maintaining a connection for two SIM cards at once diminishes the endurance of the Duo version further, though.

Conclusion

Acer's first phablet effort, the Liquid S1, is just that - an effort. The heavy and cumbersome design paired with weak chipset, subpar display and camera performance, form an underwhelming Android device.

For about Acer's 350 Euros ($460) asking price you can get the Galaxy Mega 5.8 which has two SIM card slots as well. Samsung's handset has almost identical dimensions and weight, with slightly larger battery and more RAM, but sports lower screen resolution.

If you are just looking for a good value-for-money phablet, we'd suggest the Huawei Ascend Mate, with its record large battery and stellar call quality, all for about the price of the Liquid S1. Alternatively, you can splurge a hundred more and get the Galaxy Note II, whose dimensions and performance are much more bearable, has a built-in stylus, frequent software updates, and, last but not least, a much better resale value.

Software version: 1374232634