Acer Liquid Metal: faster with Froyo

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Promising more speed and a lower price

Acer unveils the new Liquid Metal
Acer unveils the new Liquid Metal

The Acer Liquid Metal has finally been announced: the company's attempt at keeping up with the big boys in the Android smartphone market.

The new Liquid Metal comes with Android 2.2 right out of the box, as well as Acer's Breeze UI, which offers additional widgets even from the lock screen - first seen on the Acer Stream.

Spec wise it's (sort of) up there with the best, with a 3.6-inch capacitive LCD screen and a 5MP camera with AF and LED flash on the back - also capable of capturing video at 720p HD.

The processor is only a Qualcomm 7230 800 MHz offering, which we'll be interested to see if it can live up to Acer's promise of 'lightning fast navigation'.

Signal booster

To that end, 3G signal has been boosted to HSDPA 14.4Mbps and Wi-Fi to include 802.11n (where the connections allow, this means browsing up to five times faster than other devices, according to Acer).

We're hoping the battery holds on better than the others in the Acer Liquid series, as the rest of the family was notoriously poor in this area.

But we're impressed with the UK price: a top end smartphone for £299? It might not be beating the Orange San Francisco for budget-friendliness, but that still means it's a cheaper option than a lot of the others on the market right now.

The Acer Liquid Metal will be offered in two variants: brown, with a UK release date of mid November, and silver, which is set to land in December.

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Gareth Beavis
Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.