The Acer Liquid E Ferrari pulls up to the starting block with a 5-megapixel camera, HSDPA and Android 2.1 running under the hood. It’s certainly primed to run rings around its predecessor, the Acer Liquid, but can it overtake the other smartphones in its league?
What we like
The Acer Liquid E Ferrari’s 3.5-inch display is sharp and colourful – it’s capacitive too making it easier to scroll, type and text on.
The 5-megapixel camera has an ‘HD1080’ setting which can take some seriously high resolution shots. Zooming in and out of these highly detailed pictures in the Liquid E Ferrari’s gallery is very slick. Unfortunately you can’t shoot HD videos, but the highest resolution video setting (480p) doesn’t look half bad.
Music-wise there’s the option to use the the standard Android music player or one called Nemo. Nemo groups all your media (pictures, music and video) together which is handy. Sound quality is good and there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, meaning you can use your own earphones which is always a plus in our book.
Call quality to both mobiles and landlines was fine. Calls taken over the Bluetooth headset are also clear and suitably loud enough to cut through the noise of a running engine.
The Liquid E Ferrari comes with a Bluetooth headset that boasts the trademark ‘rosso corsa’ shade of red used for Ferraris and features the yellow Scuderia Ferrari shield on the back. Another little detail is the speaker next to the camera has apparently been designed to mimic an air intake inlet on aFerrari sports car (though we couldn’t tell you which one).
What we don’t like
If you’re indifferent to the Ferrari brand or have an aversion to the colour red then this will be a massive turn off – check out the standard issue white Acer Liquid E instead. The specifications of the phone are exactly the same, it just comes in a brand-less white shell. The phone also comes pre-loaded with Ferrari ‘ringtones’ (doppler effect noises of passing cars, the screech of tyres on a racetrack) which are really annoying. Thankfully these can be changed.
Aesthetics aside we found that while the Liquid E Ferrari isn’t an uncomfortable phone to hold or type on, but it’s a bit on the thick side. It takes up a bit more pocket space than your average smartphone and feels chunky when held alongside the iPhone 4 and the Nexus One.
As we said before the Liquid E Ferrari is very similar to the original Acer Liquid in terms of design. This means that some of the problems which we had with the Acer Liquid are unfortunately present here. The lack of a trackball or trackpad again makes correcting typos in text messages and entering logins tricky.
The camera is scuppered somewhat by the absence of any kind of flash. This is even more annoying this time round as the Ferrari’s camera features that lovely HD1080 shot mode. You can take pin sharp pictures wherever you want – but only in the daytime.
Finally, because the handsets soft keys are flush with the screen we found ourselves sometimes accidentally pressing buttons when we held the phone landscape-wise.
Conclusion
The Acer Liquid E Ferrari is a decent smartphone with a bright display and a powerful camera. We’re not fans of the Ferrari styling and the lack of a trackpad and flash puts us off too but if you’re desperate for a Ferrari banded phone, you could do worse.
Specification
| OS | Android |
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