Acer Liquid - Arriving Tomorrow - Look out for unboxing / review videos

[Shreedhan]

I'm so excited to get my first android phone. I can't wait.

Any questions you guys have will be answered tomorrow sometime so post away.

Anyone else pre-order this device?

YouTube - Acer Liquid Unboxing and Preview

 

[Lancewood]

I hope they improved the quality compared to pre-launch units.

BTW please do let us know if the software CD comes with tethering utility. Tx.

 

[matrix200]

Can you please tell us what is the phone's audio quality (provided you have good pair of headphones).

 

[Lancewood]

tested it on Ultimate Ears Super Fi 5 , Black eye Peas Bom Bom Pow 320Kbps, not any worse than ipod touch 32GB playing the same song/same headphones.

 

[matrix200]

Damn I am almost ready to go ahead and get this phone
The only thing remaining is tethering and I surrender

 

[Carl C]

Damn I am almost ready to go ahead and get this phone
The only thing remaining is tethering and I surrender

PDAnet : PdaNet -- USB Tether/Bluetooth DUN for Android should work with the Acer A1. If it doesn't we just need to find some drivers and then it should hopefully

 

[Shreedhan]

Audio is pretty good, I'm going to use it as my mp3 player and it's more than acceptable.

YouTube - Acer Liquid Unboxing and Preview

Unboxing / Preview.

 

[matrix200]

Hmm your file doesn't seem to play properly for some reason.
And regarding tethering I would prefer something free
Not to mention that android-wifi-tether sounds like a great way to do tethering (no cables etc).

 

[matrix200]

Hmm so it looks like the tethering is built in according to your screenshots Shreedhan?
One more quesiton then
How do you unlock the screen after timeout?

 

[richardleggett]

You have to press the power button on the side if the screen is locked, you can't just touch the screen, this is quite annoying because it means there are 2 or three steps required to unlock.. power button, menu button, and optionally a grid of 9 dots you must slide your fingers over in the correct order.

I think this is a really nice phone, the only annoyance I've had with it is that the 4 touch buttons dim too soon, so you can't see where you need to press when it's dark. I've installed the cover and it doesn't seem to hinder the capacitive display, which is OK, but not as good as the iPhone, I would think this is a software issue, but it's 95% there.

 

[JackTheMan18]

Question:
Is there any issue with 3G+ data on this phone?
Have you used the app called speedtest on it?
With which carrier are you?
Also, is there any issue with accessing the Market? (free and/or paid)

 

[richardleggett]

Mine is pretty much always showing a H (HSDPA) logo, download speeds are great, I'm on Vodafone, all market apps seem to work fine (free and paid).

 

[Aevum]

are you getting any battery problems ? mine took 17 hours to drain, its a bit far from the 400 hours in the spec,

 

[richardleggett]

Yeah the battery is pretty suprising, why do so many apps decide to fire up by themselves with no way of stopping them (task kill things like RoadSync and you'll see it will relaunch itself later on without ever opening the app). Hopefully they improve it with updates.

 

[JackTheMan18]

Unfortunately Google didn't define standards of coding for apps (unlike Apple). As a result, there is some pretty shocking examples of poor coding in some apps.
Some poorly coded apps have to be uninstalled in order to get rid of them (of course, take a backup first).

 

[sandys]

Mine drained in 14 putting it down to the fact its new, i've done lots of downloading on 3G and playing about etc, even a lot of Wifi, when my usage normalises it should be good. I actually think that 14 was good considering stuff like streaming music via 3g etc for a couple of hours.

It charges via USB and is a standard cable so I'm not bothered, there is always something to plug into.

 

[Aevum]

its nice to use around the house or when going out, but i suspect i wont be traveling with this phone,

 

[Aevum]

ok, update on my status,
i emptied the battery and gave it a nice charge all along the day with the phone turned off (so theres no drain while charging)
started up the phone, i turned off data services, and google sync for mail, calendar and contacts, and then used the task killer to remove what was not necesary,

for now, 2 hours uptime, 98% battery, it seems to be consuming around 1% battery an hour, i called the phone to make sure GSM radio is still functioning, it is,

its looking good, but i dont trust it yet, i keep getting the paranoia that as soon as i make a call or start up some program, the battery level will drop 20% in one go,

anyways, im gonna sleep on it and redo calculations tommorow morning,

 

[richardleggett]

I think you're right on the battery thing, I'm just used to a pretty boring Nokia which didn't do much and so didn't really use any battery.

Anyway I bought this in a rush without telling my gf and essentially spoiled my christmas suprise (she had bought me a PAYG iPhone, I know I know no Android on that but this is politics ), so I'm going to be selling the Acer and getting a cheaper Android device for my dev (one of the HVGA ones).

Listing is here if anyone wants to save a few coins over the standard price:

Acer Liquid A1 Android Phone- 2 Days Old- Sim-Free UK on eBay (end time 19-Dec-09 11:43:40 GMT)

(using bit.ly because phpBB is stripping the ampersand)

Obviously I have to sell it as used but I think you all know how many days this phone has actually been out! I can have it posted to you for Christmas

 

[Aevum]

im going to need a screen capture app for android... becuase you

 

[Aevum]

21:43h running, 65% battery left, this is getting interesting

btw, sorry about spamming

 

[sandys]

Yup if you can resist playing with it the battery is going to last quite a while, for example leaving it off charge over night to see battery drop, mine was something like 4% over 9hrs, I was a bit busy this weekend to be playing around much, just a couple of hours on a few app tests, demos to friends, some browsing over wifi, also spent the evening in an area which has near zero signal too which hits battery life on any phone, its been up 24hrs 30% left, seems fine too me, comparable to other devices I've has that don't have half the power or features.

I've done no app closing just left it with what ever it comes up with but disabled wifi/bt and gps when not needed, also turned off the background google data transfers. Seems to me it could easily last a few days.

 

[richardleggett]

I think they need to put in 2000mhA batteries. I've gone back to my Nokia E71 until the iphone is unwrapped, which is half the size, I can leave on email syncing, GPS, Wifi and the rest and it will last days and days without using it... but the point is you can still use it for music, maps, email and the battery use is minimal.

I didn't like the idea of having an incredible phone but not being able to leave anything turned on or even use it as it was meant to be used, seemed a bit pointless. Even iPhone users get better battery life when listening to music for several hours a day. I was left without a phone to call someone I was meant to be meeting later that day after just 7 hours of medium usage.

I will get another Android obviously for development, and If I find my next android phone has this problem, I'll just get an external battery from Amazon.

 

[sandys]

Not really tested music usage but my first battery discharge that lasted 14 hours included most of the work day streaming live radio and last.fm, that is pretty good, considering it must have been on a data connection for over 4hrs.

7 hours sounds really bad you must of had something dodgy app on there.

I will try music via sd card at woek next week once I pop in my 16gb sd card.

 

[Aevum]

anyways, final results, phone died on me this morning, total runtime around 28 hours,