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Music and sounds are key features of the Acer Stream and there are several features to help you make the most of them. Of course, that large 3.7-inch, 800 x 480 screen is a good start.
The nemoPlayer brings together video, sounds and photos in one place through a pretty neat interface that makes it easy to find what you're looking for. It could come in most handy when streaming content to a larger screen via that HDMI port.
Watching video is quite an enjoyable experience as long as you're inside. Outdoors, we found the screen to be quite reflective and it became difficult to see in bright sunlight.
However it oddly had trouble synchronising the audio and video on the sample video on the 8GB microSD card, but was fine on movies we popped on there ourselves.
NemoPlayer also won't resize some Mp4 files from 4:3 to 16:9 (despite that being the native resolution) yet will in the standard Android video player. Odd.
There is an FM radio with RDS and the ability to record directly from broadcasts, which is a nice touch.
The Acer Stream will auto scan to fill 18 presets and you can even choose between three themes for the radio.
There's a link to the MusicA service, which finds the tune you are currently listening to and gives you album and artist info as well as linking in to YouTube videos.
It worked for us first time and was pretty quick too, which is impressive. It saves all results in a history file so you can go back and check on previous 'finds' whenever you want to.
The music player is fairly standard Android fare, except that Dolby Mobile is on hand to help enhance sound quality.
This gives you access to equaliser-style settings that really did enhance the quality of audio output through the average set of earphones provided by Acer.
As well as being able to tweak treble and bass settings, you have access to a number of settings for both music and video sounds.
Streaming is also sadly woeful - despite reports the Acer Stream packs DLNA to send and receive media to different devices in your home network, it seems this isn't the case - just UPnP, which very few of your everyday gadgets support.
For a phone so named, this is a real shame and very much an opportunity missed.
With all this media functionality on offer, plus the ability to record that 720p video, you are going to need some serious storage capacity on hand.
Well, the Acer Stream packs 2GB of internal memory and a microSD card slot for adding more. Our review sample came with an 8GB card to get things started – although 10GB isn't that much for something that's supposed to be a media marvel.
So there's plenty of storage for media right out of the box and if you really want to go to town you can currently add up to 32GB of storage with a microSD card.
