Acer Liquid review: Android breed

Great organizing skills

The Liquid comes with a preloaded Documents To Go viewer which handles diverse kinds of office documents (including PDF files). The editor comes for a fee, though.

Documents To Go

The best part about it is that the viewer integrates with the Gmail app as well, which makes viewing attachments easy. Unfortunately, you are unable to save them on the phone memory (that only works for images, we guess). Attaching saved files (and we mean all kind of files) is possible though.

At any rate, not having a document viewer out of the box is a disadvantage for a high-end smartphone.

The calendar has four different types of view - agenda, daily, weekly and monthly. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.

The calendar is well organized • adding a new event is quick and easy

The Tasks app does what it says: you can easily create and modify a list of tasks.

The Tasks application in action

There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized - the buttons are big and comfortable.

It doesn't take a mathematician

The Acer Liquid features a decent alarm clock application, which allows a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own start time and repeat pattern.

The alarm clock gives a lot of room for customization

The Liquid also comes with a simple Voice Recorder aboard.

The Voice Recorder

Finally, the Liquid packs the YouTube app, which partially compensates for the web browser's lack of Flash video support. Its interface is simple enough to allow you to find what you're looking for as quickly as possible.

The YouTube app

Android Market has what you need

The Acer Liquid comes with a few preinstalled applications - nemoPlayer, Google Maps, Google Talk, Documents To Go, RoadSync Calendar, RoadSync Mail, urFooz, Spinlets and the YouTube client are all you get (yep, there is still no preloaded file browser on board).

However with the Android Market open for business you can find a large number of apps (a good portion of them free by the way) which can be downloaded directly from the handset using Wi-Fi or the mobile network.

The revamped Android Market start page

A nice touch is the warning shown if the application you're about to download has potentially unsafe access to personal data, connectivity settings, etc. The warning says exactly what data will be accessed so you can abort the download if you prefer.

When an app is being downloaded a status bar appears on the display. You can find the downloaded apps in the dedicated Downloads section.

A status bar appears when an application is being downloaded

The Android Market follows the logic of the pioneering Apple App Store. Everything about it - the structure, the look - is pretty familiar.

Finding the app you need is as easy as pie

Applications vary from basic tools (such as the one that turns the display into a flashlight) to genuine must-haves (including file managers and video players).

And while we are at it, let's take a look at some of the preloaded applications.

The urFooz app gives you access to the urFooz service. You can design your own avatar and chat and exchange photos, videos or bookmarks with friends.

urFooz app

And the other app that caught our attention was the media-streaming capable Spinlets. With its help you can listen to music, watch images or visit your favorite artists' web sites.

The Spinlets application