Careful on the sharp turns

Acer Liquid Gallant S Duo E350 is an affordable 3G smart phone with dual SIM capacity and with good performance.

The E350 has slots for inserting two SIMs that are online simultaneously. The smart phone then lets you choose which SIM will be your first choice for voice calls and which you’ll use for data connection or Internet browsing. Switching services between the two SIMs is easy.

The phone has good voice call quality and fast data usage performance thanks to its MTK6577 dual-core 1GHz processor with 1 GB working memory or RAM.

It has only 4 gigabytes of internal storage, which is expandable with a microSD card of up to 32GB.

It has a quite large screen of 4.3 inches with good resolution of 960x 540 pixels and resolution depth of 257 pixels per inch, making the screen good for viewing photos and video clips and reading web pages.

The E350 runs on the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and uses an HSDPA 3G connection at 900 and 2100 MHz.

Since it does not support TrueMove H’s 850 MHz, I tested its 3G data connection on a Wi-Fi connection. The test showed that E350 ran applications fast and its touch screen and menus were responsive. Screen scrolling was done smoothly and fast. YouTube video clips ran fast, smoothly and beautifully.

Applications like Flipboard, Wordweb, memoCal and Tunein Radio ran fast and smoothly without performance hiccups during  the test.

The E350 comes with a 5 megapixel camera, which took good quality photos for a mobile phone in a well-lit environment as long as you don’t need to use its built-in LED flash. The flash location seemed to somehow interfere with the lens taking the light when a picture was taken.

The E350 can function as an MP3 player with good music quality thanks to its SRS sound system. The SRS Sound function lets you adjust Treble, Bass and use various Music Equaliser settings. I tested the music player function with my Sony premium in-ear earphones and I was impressed in the music quality with clear voice, good bass and detailed sounds.

The E350 is quite thin and light. It is 9.9mm thick and weighs about 145 grams. Like most Android smart phones, the E350’s menus are intuitive and easy to use. But I don’t like one part of the design. Acer places the power button behind the phone along with the camera’s lens and LED flash instead on the top or at the side, as is the case of most bar-type phones.

Since we need to type the power button now and then to wake it up from sleep and screen-lock or power saving mode, it is quite inconvenient to reach for the power button at the back of the phone.

With the retail price of Bt8,990, the E350 is very affordable for dual SIM 3G smart phone.

 

     Key specs

OS: Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich

Networks: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz; UMTS, HSDPA, HSUPA 900/2100 MHz

Processor: MediaTek MT6577 dual-core 1 GHz

Memory: 1 GB RAM

Storage: 4 GB onboard, expandable with microSD card up to 32 GB

Camera: 5 MP

Display: 4.3-inch touch screen LCD with 540 x 960 257 ppi resolution

Connectivity: USB, Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi

Battery: 1,500 mAh

Dimension: 129 x 66 x 9.9 mm

Weight: 145g