Acer have confirmed that their first Android smartphone, the Acer Liquid A1, will arrive in late November, at least in the UK. According to retailer Clove, the Qualcomm Snapdragon based smartphone – which will run Android 1.6 Donut rather than the newer Android 2.0 OS – is priced at £286 pre-tax ($481).
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 may have been making the Android headlines this week, but it’s not the first smartphone running Google’s open-source OS to pack a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset. That honor goes to the Acer Liquid A1 – though the company have apparently underclocked the CPU to 768MHz – set to be the first Snapdragon Android phone to reach consumers’ hands. Arne from the::unwired has been playing with the Liquid and has put together a “preview” review.
Another week come and gone, naturally it is time for the week in review. Monday we pulled the Nokia N900 from its box and videoed the unboxing for your perusal. Those cool Sony Ericsson Satio and Aino are finally hitting stores. The Aino can stream content from a PS3.
Verizon have launched an offensive against the iPhone, with a new campaign called DroidDoes.com for their upcoming Motorola Droid Android smartphone. The handset, previously known by its codenames of Tao and Sholes, is being promoted as offering everything the iPhone eschews: an open development platform, the ability to run background processes, a flexible, open App Store and replaceable batteries, among other things. Verizon have also set up a countdown timer which suggests that the Motorola Droid will arrive on October 30th 2009.
The Android race is hotting up, with another leaked live image of the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X3 showing there’s plenty of room in the market for a big-screen slab of megapixel-toting smartphone. Yet another handset tipped to use Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon chipset – as found in the recently announced Acer Liquid A1 and expected to make an appearance in the rumored HTC Dragon – the XPERIA X3 will also pack an 8-megapixel autofocus camera.
Up front there’s a 4-inch 852 x 480 capacitive touchscreen, while under the hood lurks both dualband HSPA, WiFi b/g and GPS. Full specifications for the handset were previewed by a prematurely posted Expansys product listing, though right now there’s nothing approaching official confirmation from Sony Ericsson themselves.
What’s not on show from this snapshot is the distinctive UI that Sony Ericsson are tipped to have included on the smartphone, back when we knew it under the codename “Rachel”. That UI – which you can see in a leaked video demo after the cut – is expected to replace the standard Android interface perhaps even more fully than HTC Sense does on the HTC Hero. The XPERIA X3 is expected to arrive on the market in January 2010.
Acer’s Liquid A1 Android smartphone may have Snapdragon under the hood, but that’s not enough to keep us happy these days. We also like to see a custom UI, and from the early details coming out of HDBlog.it it looks as though Acer have done a little – though not a lot – to tweak OS 1.6 Donut. In fact, we’re more excited by the little status LEDs they’ve embedded into the top edge of the Liquid, to show whether you have new messages and what the battery status is.
Acer have officially announced their first Android smartphone, the Acer Liquid A1, and it’s also the first handset running the Android platform to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor. The Liquid has a WVGA touchscreen, HSPA connectivity and a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, geo-tagging, ISO and a self-timer.
The speedy Qualcomm chipset also means the Liquid can support 3D graphics, and the phone will run Android 1.6.
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