Sleek, sexy and surprisingly cheap

One of the best mid-range smartphones to come onto the market in recent months, the Acer Liquid E3 does most of the things more pricey smartphones do, but at a fraction of the cost.

It looks good too with an attractive curved body framed in black with subtle red lines at the bottom and top and a metallic-look back cover. It is only 8.9mm thin and weighs about 135 grammes.

Acer has been able to keep the price at just Bt6,990 by using a low-cost alternative process to the expensive chips from Qualcomm and NVIDIA.

Instead of using the Snapdragon or Tegra chipsets, Liquid E3 uses MediaTek MT6589 quad-core processor running at 1.2 GHz. It has one gigabyte of RAM or working memory instead of the 2 or 3 GB found in some flagship models.

Liquid E3 has only 4 GB of storage but that’s unimportant as you can expand the storage with a microSD card anyway.

Despite the affordable processor, Liquid E3 has good multimedia performance. You can watch video clips on its 4.7-inch HD display with IPS (in-plane switching) technology and 1080 x 720 pixel resolution.

Liquid E3 has a good main camera with 13-megapixel resolution and a very bright and fast lens of f/1.8 aperture. And its 2 MP front-facing camera is good for taking selfies because the flash brightens up your face.

You can quickly turn on the camera by pressing and holding the AcerRAPID button located directly below the rear camera’s lens. And while camera app is open, you can push the AcerRAPID button to take a picture. If you use a front camera, the button is convenient for snapping that selfie as you use your index figure to press down on it. A long press will take four continuous shots.

The AcerRAPID button is a nice user interface design. If the screen is locked, press the button lightly to unlock the phone. While the screen is active, a light press on the AcerRAPID button will launch the Google Play Music app. If you don’t want to music app, them assign another to the same function.

The main camera provides several fun shooting modes, including EV bracket, HDR, Best shot, Face beauty and Bright magic Plus.

You can manually select another 12 scene modes, among them Night, Sunset, Portrait, Landscape and Night portrait. Or you can use the Auto scene detection mode, which allows the camera to detect the lighting environment and select the mode accordingly.

The Bright magic mode is fun to use. It creates clear and bright photos in low light conditions by taking multiple shots at once.

The camera also boasts a range of fun colours including Aqua, Mono, Sepia, Negative and Whiteboard.

Activate Quick Touch and you can play a song from a designated playlist by drawing “Z” on the screen when the display is off. The display will remain off while the music is playing. You can also swipe left to right across the display to play the next song. Draw “O” to exit the music player.

Draw “I” by swiping up from the bottom of the screen up or vice versa to unlock the display.

You can access the Acer Float menu by tapping the Recent button at the bottom of the display to open an app as a “floating” window, which can be moved around. Up to four Float apps can be added to the menu. The Float apps include Browser, Buttons, Calculator, Camera, Dialer, Maps, Notes, and Stopwatch.

Liquid E3 supports 3G of HSPA+ in 900 and 2,100 MHz bandwidth and dual SIM cards with SIM management that allow you to easily set which SIM is used for making voice calls and which is for data connection. Unfortunately, it did not support my TrueMove H’s 850MHz 3G account so I tested it mainly on a Wi-Fi connection.

Liquid E3 may not be super fast like some flagship smart phones that use expensive Snapdragon 800 or 801 processors but the response is satisfactory and certainly not slow. Video clips and YouTube clips play smoothly and the camera takes good quality shots for a mobile phone.

 

Key specifications

 

OS: Android 4.2.2

Network: HSPA+/WCDMA: 900 / 2100 MHz; GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850MHz / 900MHz / 1800MHz / 1900MHz

Display: 4.7 inch, IPS, HD 720P (1080 x 720)

Main Camera: 13 MP auto focus, f1.8 with LED flash light

Front Camera: 2 MP with front LED

Processor: Quad Core 1.2 GHz, MT6589

Storage: 4 GB

Memory: 1 GB

Battery: 2000 mAh, embedded Li-polymer battery

Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 EDR, GPS/AGPS, Micro SD slot, Micro USB, 3.5mm audio jack

Sensor: Light sensor, Accelerometer, Proximity sensor, e-compass, hall sensor

SIM: Dual micro SIM 

Dimension: 138 x 68.8 x 8.9 mm

Weight: 135 g