Acer Liquid Metal review

A 1500mAh battery powers the Acer Liquid Metal and does a pretty good job. We aren't sure where Acer gets its estimated 11 hours of talktime from, but we found that it did a little better than the norm in everyday use, getting us through nearly two full days between charges, where one day had minimal use and the other day was closer to average.

Now, admittedly our 'average' might not equate to your 'average', but we're confident that a medium-to-heavy user will get through a day without having to rush off and find a mains outlet.

The Acer Liquid Metal has an app called Social Jogger which has its own widget. Its role is to bring together Facebook and Twitter feeds. Very annoyingly, if you've already signed into both apps for contacts syncing you have to sign in again for sync with Social Jogger.

Once you've done this, Social Jogger brings messages from both sources together in a rather weird user interface that has a round dial wheel to the left of the screen, which you use to move between posts.

Social Jogger can't show the whole of a tweet at once – you need to tap it to get a full screen rendition, which is very annoying.

It's easy to write something though. You just tap into the box at the bottom of the screen, choose Share, then decide whether you want your pearls of wisdom to go to Facebook or Twitter.

Once you've got Twitter and Facebook set up in Social Jogger, there's also a nice widget that delivers info to one of the 'level one' widget screens.

You've probably already guessed that Google Maps is present, alongside A-GPS, and we found the Acer Liquid Metal good at maintaining a GPS fix. Despite what we said about the battery earlier, you probably won't want to use the GPS for long point-to-point navigation sessions, because it's a real power hog.