"The Liquid Jade is the best phone yet from Acer, with a capable camera
and a decent design, but it doesn't really offer enough to be able to
rise above the slew of phones already at this mid-range price point."
- MP3/WAV/AAC player - MP4/H.264/H.263 player - Organizer - Photo viewer/editor - Voice memo/dial - Predictive text input
Introduction and Design Better
known for its affordable laptops, tablets and other gadgetry, Acer
seems keen to stake out some ground in the budget-to-mid-range
smartphone market too. It's the first phone we've seen from the Taiwanese firm since the ultra-cheap Liquid Z4 and the slightly dearer Liquid E3 appeared in February, but there are more affordable Acer handsets on the way. The
sticker price for an unlocked Acer Liquid Jade stands at £229 (around
$360, AU$400), though you can probably better this online; as yet there
are no details of what you can expect to pay on contract, or even if it
will be available through the usual operator channels at all. That puts it firmly in the mid-range, substantially cheaper than the big hitters (such as the Samsung Galaxy S5) but a step above the budget models (such as the Motorola Moto E). It's going up directly against the likes of the Sony Xperia M2 and the Motorola Moto G - and that means the phone has a tough fight on its hands. It's the best-looking Acer smartphone to see the light of day so far, we'll give it that muchThe
Acer Liquid Jade is something of an oddity in many ways: it looks
unlikely to make it to the States and in Asia it comes as a pair with
the Leap smartband. The
Liquid Jade offers some unusual features like dual SIM capabilities and
a whopping 13-megapixel camera but cuts back in other areas — there's
no 4G support here, for example, which is a shame as the high-speed data
network rolls out across the country. The key question
is: has Acer done enough to make the Liquid Jade stand out in a crowded
mid-range field? Or is it another handset destined to sink without trace
outside of Asia? You're
not going to hear any sharp intakes of breath when you take out the
Acer Liquid Jade in company, but then you're not going to be embarrassed
to have it on show either. It's a neatly designed, light, 5-inch
handset with a faux-metal trim around the edges, and it's functional
without being spectacular (something of a running theme for this phone).I
like 5-inch screens - for me they hit the sweet spot for a large-ish
display that you can still just about use with one hand - but the 720 x
1280 IPS display gives the game away that this isn't a premium handset. With
a 294ppi resolution it's crisp and bright in use, but it's one of the
corners that have been cut to get to this price. Functional but not
spectacular, again. There's space for two SIMs if you're busy living a dual identityThe
handset measures 140.5mm x 69mm x 7.5mm (5.53in x 2.72in x 0.30in) and
weighs in at a very light 110g (5.64 oz) - that's 20g lighter than the Nexus 5
I usually carry around with me. It's difficult to fault the design,
though it feels a little cheap and is very plasticky (which means
fingerprints can be a problem on the back).It feels
comfortable and well built when held and the protruding camera lens
around the back isn't really a problem. The micro USB port sits on the
base, with the headphone socket on top together with the power button;
the dual-SIM card and microSD card slots are on the left with the volume
controls in the usual position on the right. The camera lens protrudes slightly from the back but it's not a massive problemThat
microSD card slot certainly helps: there's only 8GB of on-board
storage, presumably another corner-cutting tactic to keep the price
down. Black, grey, green and white options are shown on Acer's website but it was the black one I had in to test for this review.
Key features
What's
most notable about the Acer Liquid Jade is that there's very little of
note about it. The dual-SIM capability seems a novelty more than
anything else and most of the rest of the handset's specs are par for
the course. If you were wanting to pick out the phone's highlights (or
indeed lowlights) then you'd be struggling for material. Perhaps
the biggest eyebrow raiser is that 13MP camera - megapixels are by no
means everything, of course, but that's a step above most other handsets
out there (even the iPhone 6 settles for an 8MP snapper). More on the camera later in this review, but it's worth pointing out here. The 13MP camera is a cut above most other phones in this area of the marketThe
price could be another distinguishing feature of the Acer Liquid Jade,
but while you could label it as affordable, a £200 outlay is still
significant. Considering it's up against the very good value Moto G, the
Liquid Jade doesn't quite look cheap enough (though to be fair it's
thinner and lighter than the Motorola handset). There's a
glut of mid-range Android and Windows Phone models on the market and
the Acer Liquid Jade hasn't got the features to make it stand out from
the pack. The battery life can swing from pretty average
to pretty impressive, as I'll explain shortly, but this can vary from
user to user and it's not really enough to tip the balance
significantly. The Acer Liquid Jade is a phone that does
well in most areas - design, camera, battery life, software, price -
without really getting you up out of your seat. Interface, performance and battery
Android 4.4.2 KitKat is the operating system you'll find on
your Acer Liquid Jade if you decide to invest in one. Acer's tweaks to
Android itself don't go to the same depth as those made by Samsung, HTC
or LG but there's a slew of bloatware apps here covering file
management, photos and cloud storage. An extra camera
app, an extra messaging app, a rather ugly-looking contacts replacement
app, the little-known Polaris 5 office suite... it's not a particularly
pleasant sight. There's even an unappealing quick mode launcher (for
kids or older users) that it took me ten minutes and some web searching
to extricate my way out of. Among the usual suspects in
the widget drawer you'll find a host of weather and time widgets
together with a data use monitor that can warn you if you're approaching
your monthly limit. The quick mode is designed for youngsters and oldsters but it's not immediately clear how you disable itFortunately,
you can install all of your usual apps if you want to go your own way.
Videos look sharp and vibrant on the Liquid Jade's screen and audio is
above average thanks to the single rear speaker and the DTS-HD Premium
Sound enhancements built into the phone. It's not movie theatre quality
but it's surprisingly decent for a mid-range Android handset.The
Swype-enabled keyboard lets you peck at the keys as normal or keep your
finger down and draw the words out. I found it a little disorientating
to use but that's only because I'm used to stock Android and some of the
secondary buttons are in a different place. No doubt it's easy to
operate once you get the hang of it, though it's not particularly
appealing visually. The settings app will be familiar to anyone who's used Android before though there are some small tweaksThe
settings drop-down drawer you can open from the notifications tray is a
little overwhelming but it provides easy access to a bunch of options:
GPS, brightness power saving, auto rotate, data usage, messages and the
built-in flashlight app. There's also a float caller
feature that you can activate here that means a smaller pop-up appears
when someone rings (rather than it taking up the whole screen) - I've
seen it on previous Acer phones and it's actually a feature that makes a
lot of sense.
Performance
Performance is one of
the areas where the Acer Liquid Jade slips to 'satisfactory' rather than
'good'. A ho-hum 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek processor and 1GB of RAM
keep things moving, but I noticed occasional lag and hold-ups while apps
got their ducks in a row. It doesn't spoil the
experience too much - perhaps the casual user wouldn't even be bothered
by it - but it goes in the drawback column for me. Try
and do anything too demanding on this handset and it's likely to start
wheezing, though it's fine for day-to-day use on the whole. Did I say,
"functional but not spectacular," yet? Performance levels from the Acer Liquid Jade are nothing more than satisfactory for day-to-day useThose
impressions are backed up by the Acer Liquid Jade's benchmark scores.
It registered a multi-core score of 1160 on Geekbench 3, which puts it a
smidgen ahead of our old friend the Moto G but some way behind the
two-year old Samsung Galaxy S3. It's in the sort of range reached by a lot of budget and mid-range phones.
Battery life
Taking
on our regular reviewsense 90-minute looped video test, the Acer Liquid
Jade slipped from 100% to 71%, which means the 2100 mAh battery doesn't
hold a charge quite as well as the Moto G or the iPhone 6 Plus do. Most phones we test perform better than that so you can't expect outstanding battery life... or can you? The
phone has a special CPU power-saving mode that kicks in when the phone
is idle, and when not in use, the handset's battery level drops about
one percentage point an hour. It's not difficult to do the maths: if you
keep your phone in your pocket all of the time, you could squeeze days
out of the Acer Liquid Jade. The effects of our video loop battery test followed by the CPU saving mode in action overnightPresumably
the CPU saver is a kind of sleep mode where very little is happening at
all. Even if you're going to be using the phone extensively in the day,
it's refreshing to pick it up in the morning to find the battery level
has hardly dropped overnight, even with Wi-Fi and sync on. That's not
something I can say about most of the phones I've had.In
normal use it was a less impressive story, with most standard
activities (web browsing, gaming, music) chipping away at the battery
life noticeably. I'd say you can expect the usual day's worth of use
from the Acer Liquid Jade if you're a medium-to-heavy user of your
phone; if it's sat idle for most of the time, then that power-saving
mode can do wonders for you. You can customise a power-saving mode of your own through the phone's settingsThere's
also a dedicated Power save app that you can use to specify which
features (such as mobile data and Wi-Fi) are switched off when you're
trying to save battery life. It works like the power-saving plans in
Windows and it's a handy extra option to have. The essentials and camera
The essentials
The phone dialler and contacts apps
that Acer has put together here look smart and clear but behind the
tweaked interface there are no real differences between these apps and
the ones you'll get with stock Android. The calls I made
were loud and clear and I didn't suffer any drops, though it's worth
pointing out that there's no ambient sensor on the Acer Liquid Jade, so
it can't tell when you have your face up to the handset. It's
a small issue that isn't really a problem but it shows another area
where you're getting what you pay for, something less than a
top-of-the-range smartphone. The 2MP snapper on the
front of the unit is fine for video calling but that's about it, which
is par for the course on the majority of phones out there. If you really
want to look your best on Skype or Hangouts then you're going to need
something like the HTC Desire Eye. The dialler and contacts apps have been given a lick of Acer paint but there are no unique featuresHangouts
is here for your text messaging needs but there is actually another
messaging app that looks like it's been left over from the Android
editions of days gone by. It's basic and functional but you're probably
going to want to jump ship to Hangouts or indeed something else as
quickly as possible.The web is another place where
you'll be spending plenty of your time: both the pre-installed browser
app and Chrome worked smoothly, with no problems accessing sites over
Wi-Fi or mobile networks (don't forget there's no 4G support here). Moving
around some of the flashier, more interactive sites was a sluggish
experience, which is probably another consequence of the average
internal specifications sported by the Acer Liquid Jade.
Camera
Back
to that 13MP camera then, and the Acer Liquid Jade managed to take very
good pictures in most lighting conditions, a summary you could apply to
many a mid-range phone of recent times. Low light occasionally confused
the camera software but I still managed to get decent results in dark
areas with and without flash. This is by no means a
mobile camera up there with the very best, but it is a step above what
you would normally expect for something at this price point. With
Android phones typically struggling in the camera department, it's one
of the Acer Liquid Jade's best assets. The rear camera has 13MPGiven
enough time to frame a shot and work out your settings you can get
images that are sharp and well saturated. If you're trying to snap
something quickly and the lighting is less than ideal then blur and
noise are definite problems - the autofocus isn't particularly nimble.Acer's
own camera app comes with a bevy of different modes and settings, some
of which are more useful than others: landscape, night, night portrait,
backlight, backlight portrait and portrait modes are all here as well as
the standard auto setting, and you can control white balance manually
and apply a handful of colour effects too. There are plenty of options and settings to play around with on Acer's own camera appIn
terms of video you can capture 1080p clips and there's a time lapse
feature here that's fun to play around with - you can even pause
recording, Vine-style. Like Samsung's proprietary photo
app it's possible to switch from videos to photos with one tap rather
than two which helps. It's a more feature-rich alternative to the stock
Android camera, though a little less polished. The camera generally impresses in terms of sharpness, colour and vibrancyClick here to see the full resolution imageIf you give the camera enough time you can get some decent low-light shots, but it's sometimes hit and missClick here to see the full resolution imageIn most situations you'll get better pictures from the Liquid Jade than from other smartphones at this priceClick here to see the full resolution image Verdict The Acer Liquid Jade doesn't disappoint but it won't blow
you away either: what good points the phone has are balanced out with a
few niggles so you'll want to make sure it offers the benefits you need
before parting with your cash. The handset does the job,
and is kind on your wallet too. It's not a bad choice if you want a
mid-range, decent value Android handset, but the problem is it's up
against some strong competition.
We liked
That
CPU saver battery mode is certainly impressive, the 13-megapixel camera
takes better shots than most phones at this kind of price, and in the
design department you get a thin and light handset that looks sleek and
feels comfortable in the hand.
We disliked
In general, battery life isn't amazing, and you get a pile of bloatware that isn't particularly useful. The
phone has middling internal specs and performance, and comes with a
price that doesn't really make the Acer Liquid Jade stand out enough in a
crowded market.
Final verdict
What matters to
you most in a phone? If it's a decent camera, a long-lasting standby
mode or the ability to use two SIMs in one handset then get the Acer
Liquid Jade near the top of your shortlist. In all other
respects - value, design, performance - the phone manages to do okay,
but not much more than that. It's definitely Acer's best phone yet,
however, and at this kind of price level it's perhaps unfair to moan too
much about its shortcomings. By David Nield source:-Acer Liquid Jade review
