Acer Liquid S100 review

The coolest thing about using media on the Acer Liquid is the ability to scroll through your files and whatnot from the home screen, as we mentioned above. Less good news - the Acer Liquid eschews the standard Android player as the default media application.

If you've read any of our other reviews of Android phones, you'll note that there's a distinct lack of love for them, but what's been bundled on the Liquid is an even worse option, which surprised us.

The substitute is Nemo player, an application that bizarrely wants to crash the phone every time we used it to open a video. Want to watch more than one in succession? You can't. Want to watch a three minute music video smoothly? You can't... you just get a choppy, out of sync effort that frankly we found awful.

Of course, you can always look at the videos through the Android video player, and this is a nice option to have, with the playback smooth enough and, while not as clear as other programs on other phones, perfectly passable.

However the problem is the Acer Liquid's little scrollwheel on the side of the home screen is set to use Nemo Player, and there doesn't seem to be any way to change that. This means that if you want to use the one feature of the phone that uses the cool Android home screen overlay you'll have to put up with poor playback.

Music is a little better, as despite the Liquid using the Nemo player again, it has at least managed to eke some better performance out of the device with a large and easy-to-use interface - although we're not sure it adds much on top of the default player.

Music playback on the Android OS is satisfactory - upgrades over time from Google and the rest of the Open Handset Alliance (the group behind Android's development) have made it into a useable program thankfully.

A set of four large buttons take you into a finger-friendly media player, with album art a prominent part of the display. Sadly there's no way to update this cover art from the program itself, but it's not a deal breaker.

There's the usual other range of Google goodies on board for media too, with the top being Google-owned YouTube, which is well-implemented. You can watch videos in high quality with ease, and the interface loads quickly with minimal search lag.

If you're going to download something to make the media better on the Acer Liquid, the first place you should go is beeb Player. Essentially an unofficial port of iPlayer, it allows streaming of current programs over the internet, although there's no download option, but we expect to see it in the official application whenever it appears.