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Battery Life
One benefit of the Acer Liquid Leap's basic style is that the battery lasts for a fair bit longer than a full-on smartwatch. I got five days' use off a charge, so it won't feel like you're plugging the thing in as often as your phone.
As there's no charge socket, the Acer Liquid Leap also has IPx7 waterproofing. This means you can submerge it in water for 30 minutes with no problem — a shower or a bit of rain is no problem at all. Acer even claims you can swim in the thing, which is generally not supported by watches that use rubber seals, because of the chlorine or salt.
Like most other fitness bands, though, charging is a bit of a faff. You need to lock the Acer Liquid Leap into a little plastic shell that has its own microUSB socket. I found the thing a bit too easy to misplace, but this means you can use the same charger as your phone, if you're an Android user.
Of course, the battery stamina doesn't seem all that hot when you compare the Liquid Leap to something like the Garmin Vivofit, which gets you a year of use from a battery.
Verdict
A year or so ago, this would have been a buzz product, but with so many fitness bands coming out now, the Acer Liquid Leap struggles to stand out. There's nothing about it that's bad as such but the feature set is limited, the style lacking and seriously, a digital watch with no alarm?!
We liked
The screen on the Liquid Leap is very good, and it's competitively priced at £79.99. The addition of limited smartwatch-style notifications and music controls inches the VFM ticker up a little further, too.
We disliked
To be honest, there's as little to actively dislike about the Liquid as there is to like about it. You can't say it does anything exceptionally, and it can be slow to respond, and a little inaccurate when counting steps. It's short on features and those it has are unexceptional, basically. But nothing about it is outright terrible. "Meh" might be the word, here.
Final verdict
If you're in the market for a fitness band, you can do worse than the Liquid Leap, but you can also do better - there's the Garmin Vivosmart, for instance. The price is low, and it may get lower online, but for now, while I wouldn't say "No way" to anyone considering the Liquid Leap, I also wouldn't enthusiastically urge them to dive in.
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