Acer Liquid S100 review

Do high end specs automatically make a good Android phone?

The definitive Acer Liquid S100 review
The definitive Acer Liquid S100 review

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Google has brought an irritating problem with Android – when you start the phone up and synchronise your Gmail account, all your contacts are automatically thrown at the phone. This would be great, but unless you've spent a good three hours sorting through them, it's a veritable mish-mash of nonsense.

Of course you can choose not to see these, but there are always some you need to keep, and that makes life a little harder when trying to organise your contacts book.

Acer liquid s100

Android's contact list is pretty basic – slide up and down to find the person you're looking for, grab the tab on the side to move through quickly and alphabetically, or just type a name in through the search box to open things up and find it easily.

Contacts are listed with photo and personalised ringtone and so on – and we were pretty excited to see the ability to link social networks with contacts as well. However, sadly the problems within the Acer Liquid system were too great to ever see how this worked as trying to synchronise Facebook or Flickr within the phone led to the application throwing up an error message and asking us to close it down.

Acer liquid s100

So it means we're back to only seeing the Android contacts menu, which isn't all that bad in fairness. We're not fans of the tabbed system which is used for everything calling-based, but it is nice to be able to choose your favourites and have them in a separate list to offer quick access to those you call and text the most.

The dialler is nicely laid out, although it would have been nice to have some smart dialling on offer, as it's not always easy to navigate through to your favourite friends using the contacts tab, which can be a little hard to grab and slide.

Acer liquid s100

And when you've added in Google contacts, it's nigh on impossible for the Acer Liquid to manage to sort them all alphabetically for some reason, with it spiriting away a portion of your friends to a hidden, impossible to find location.

Calling on the Acer Liquid is OK - the call quality isn't brilliant but it's stable enough, although we had trouble finding the speaker hole with our ear in that expanse of plastic at times.

Acer liquid s100

Coverage was good enough to function in most places, although it dropped out fairly regularly when in a moving vehicle - in fact, it wasn't even worth bothering with at times. We've tested other devices in the same situation, such as the HTC HD2, so we know it can be done well.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.