The new Acer Liquid A1 Android smartphone (what a mouthful!) is now shipping in the UK, according to the acerliquid blog. A couple of online retailers already have it in stock, and their prices range from £286 to £295.64, approximately RM 1,574 to RM 1,629. The A1 was actually previewed at a recent session here in Malaysia, to which I was not invited. The pricing was not revealed at the launch, but I don’t expect the phone to sell for significantly less than RM 2,000. I believe the A1 will be released in Malaysia before the year end.
I would avoid the A1 for now due to a couple of reasons:
- Acer doesn’t seem to have done much work with the base Android operating system compared to HTC and Motorola.
- Acer is still a relative unknown in the handset business although they bought Glofish and renamed it their own.
- the Snapdragon processor in the A1 is a neutered one – it’s actually 1GHz but Acer in all their infinite wisdom decided to limit it to 768MHz.
- it only runs Donut, aka Android 1.6. Very soon, we will see devices from HTC running Android 2.0, I believe. Google already has 2.1 in the works.
In case you have forgotten, the specifications of the A1 are as follows:
| • | Processor: Qualcomm 8250/SnapDragon 768MHz |
| • | Dimensions: - 115x 62.5 x 12.5mm |
| • | Weight: 135g |
| • | Battery: - Talk Time: 5 hrs - Standby Time: 400 hrs - Capacity: 1350 mAh |
| • | Display: - 480 x 800 pixels/3.5″ - Touch Sensitive(Capacitive) |
| • | Network: - 2G: 850/900/1800/1900 (Quad-Band) - 3G: 850/900/2100 (Tri-Band) - HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) - HSUPA (2 Mbps) |
| • | Camera: - 5 mega-pixels (auto-focus) - Digital Zoom |
| • | Video: - Video Recording (QVGA) - Supported formats: MP4, 3GP - Video Streaming |
| • | Music: - Supported formats: MP3, AAC, eAAC+ , eAAC |
| • | Ringtones: - Monophonic - Polyphonic - MP3 - AAC |
| • | Messaging: - SMS - MMS (with video) - E-mail (POP3, SMTP, IMAP4, Gmail) - Instant Messaging (Google Talk) |
| • | Memory: - Phone Book (unlimited) - Dialled Calls - Missed Calls - Received Calls - 256MB (internal) - microSDHC (external) |
| • | Call Features: - Hands Free - Caller ID |
| • | Connectivity: - miniUSB - 3.5mm Audio Connector - Bluetooth (2.0) - Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11g) |
| • | Navigation: - AGPS - Google Maps |
Beats the hell out of me if anybody would want to buy this for anything more than RM900 !
There are so many better established brands in the market , and the only thing Acer can do is to sell it cheap for a start, until it proves itself which may be never unless they go pasar malam
[Reply]
Da Alpha Dog Reply:
December 10th, 2009 at 10:47 am
@albert,
How did you arrive at the RM 900 number? Which phone are you benchmarking against?
[Reply]
... Reply:
January 16th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
wow albert,you are really know nothing…
[Reply]
Possible they underclocked it to save on battery life?
[Reply]
Da Alpha Dog Reply:
December 10th, 2009 at 10:50 am
@Jack, if that was the case, why not use an older and slower Qualcomm processor? Or use a 100MHz processor instead, I’m sure this will stretch battery life to a few days, although it may take you 2 hours to create an appointment la…
That neutering just doesn’t make sense on so many levels, don’t you think?
[Reply]
Heng Sin Reply:
December 10th, 2009 at 11:52 am
For the record, iPhone is also underclock – http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/gallery-deep-inside-the-iphone-3g-s/ , it is actually a pretty common practise in the mobile industry. Also, the lack of vendor customization to the stock android interface isn’t as bad as it might looks like as there are some nice home replacement application on the android market ( home++, gde, panda home, etc ). Anyway, I think we should not buy any android based phone until Google make Android Market available to Malaysia users. It is just not fair that we pay the same money but doesn’t get the full android experience.
[Reply]
Da Alpha Dog Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
@Heng Sin, that’s interesting. As for the things that “come in the box”, so to speak, I think that a lot of users today, especially the new users to a particular platform, wants some enhancements to ease the transition to a new operating system. So, that’s where HTC Sense comes in. And the fact that the Hero has been selling well must be partly due to this reason. On the HD2, again, Sense outshines the competition. Of course there will be hardcore “modders” out there who prefer a plain vanilla operating system so that they can mod the system to their heart’s content.
And yes, we should wait until the Android Market is available officially in Malaysia. But, as we’ve not seen Android phones other than HTC ones which come with Sense, I wonder if a stock Android smartphone from Acer, for example, will have the Market application? I’d be most interested to know.
[Reply]
Jack Lee Reply:
December 10th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Or maybe there is no newer Qualcomm chip that is below 1000mhz but above 600mhz?
[Reply]
Da Alpha Dog Reply:
December 11th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
@Jack, I don’t think there are that many mobile chips out there and the Snapdragon by default only runs at 1GHz, though in this case we know it can be underclocked.
[Reply]
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