Acer Liquid Mini review

Acer Liquid Mini review: Media

There's quite a bit going on media wise with the Acer Liquid Mini, though nothing particularly new. There's barely any internal memory – just 512MB, in fact – so you're going to need a microSD card to store music and video, and Acer supplies a 2GB card to get you started.

The music player is basic looking, but functional, with playback controls offering what you need.

When you're listening to music, there's a little control bubble available in the notifications bar, so that you can fiddle with playback from within any app.

The loudspeaker delivers a fairly poor quality, tinny sound, and its volume isn't great. The Acer headphones do a reasonable job, but the flat, in-ear buds never stay in our own ears very well. In short, the music player does a job, but not spectacularly well.

Video playback has to be done via the Gallery. The screen quality isn't really good enough for hugely vibrant rendering, and the screen is too small to double up as a frequently used video player, but we found it coped fine with the MP4s we threw at it.

There is an alternative for media playback in the shape of Acer's own Nemo Player which brings music, photos and video together in one place.

It has a slightly nicer looking skin and the added advantage of going online to Gracenote and finding information about playing tunes. That's really handy if you don't have album art available.

There is an FM radio on-board, too. It'll autoscan, and you can save stations individually and make a favourites list. RDS support is good, and with supporting stations you get a ticker of what's playing. You can't record from the radio, though.

As well as all this there's DLNA in the shape of an applet Acer calls its Media Server. This will send photos, video and music stored on the Acer Liquid Mini to compatible devices. It works fine, but it is a shame Acer doesn't bother to include any information on how to set it up.