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Features
This isn't a real smartwatch, either, so what you'll see on the little display is basic. Two taps will show you the time and date, while sideways flicks on the screen take you to pages showing your steps that day, how far you've walked, the calories you've burnt up and the minutes spent active.
One flick further takes you to the apps section. But don't get too excited as the Acer Liquid Leap's extra features are pretty limited.
You can engage sleep tracking, check out your phone notifications and go to the music controls section. There are no bits beyond this as the Acer Liquid Leap doesn't run Android Wear or another pre-existing OS, but a system Acer seems to have cobbled together itself.
It hooks into an app on your phone called Leap Manager, and while it works for Android and iOS, it's not the slickest and is a bit basic. I had a few issues hooking it up to a couple of test phones, and even within the Acer Liquid Leap's limited scope, it's pretty rudimentary.
While the Acer Liquid Leap handles notifications, it only relays those of calls, texts and meetings, not Whatsapp messages and so on. You'll see the same deal in the music controls. It'll work with the default player, but not Spotify. It's limited.
Fitness Tracking
The Acer Liquid Leap is only meant for very basic fitness tracking. While it can do a few things, its brains are really pretty basic. It uses an absolutely tiny Cortex M0 processor and it only really has one actual sensor — a motion tracker 'G-sensor'.
This can tell when you're moving, but has no clue about where you are, the actual speed you're travelling (beyond a guess) or whether you're moving up/downhill. Serious runners will want GPS in their watch and rival Fitbits offer an altimeter, which offers a count of the number of steps you climb each day.
Like all other wrist-worn trackers, the Acer Liquid Leap also struggles with accuracy — judging between when you're walking/running or just flapping your arms around in angry conversation. However, comparing with a tracker measuring in the pocket (which doesn't have the same problems) the results are only generally a few per cent off. Unless you're a wildly gesticulating kind of guy, at any rate.
The Acer Liquid Leap is best thought-of as a simple way to see how truly lazy you are and act as a motivation to get your backside into gear to change that. In actuality it's pretty basic.
The sleep tracking is hardly Olympic standard either. It really doesn't do much more than time the gap between the point where you press the 'sleep' button to where you tell the band you've woken up. If you're expecting a scientific run-down of the quality of your sleep from hour to hour based on your movements, you won't find it here. Not unless Acer adds that in an update.
One real sore point is the Acer Liquid Leap doesn't have an alarm. It really isn't a 24-hour buddy in the way the best smartwatches and fitness trackers are. You can't sync the data with other fitness platforms like Endomondo either, so if you don't like Acer's software you're pretty stuffed, for now at least.
