Acer Stream Preview
Acer Stream Preview
Android is picking up steam and multiple smartphone manufacturers are joining the Android revolution. HTC, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and others are rolling out numerous Android based smartphones and it is estimated that the total number of Android based phones should reach 100 by Q2 2011. Acer launched the Acer Liquid some time back but it met with a lukewarm response. With its new release, the Acer Stream, Acer is hoping to become one of the leading Android manufacturers.
Design (4 out of 5)
The Acer Stream has a nice industrial design which resembles the Nexus One and the HTC HD2. It is much better compared to the boxy design of the Acer Liquid. It has dimensions of 119.5 x 63 x 11.2 mm and weighs 140 gms which makes it quite pocketable.
It has a spacious 3.7 inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels and support for 16 M colors. The display quality is excellent, and combined with its large size, makes it ideal for watching videos. The touchscreen display is very responsive.
User Interface (4 out of 5)
The Acer Stream runs on Android 2.1 Eclair with the Acer Touch 3D UI v 4.0. The Acer Touch 3D UI is nice but isn’t as refined as HTC Sense or Motorola’s MotoBLUR UI. It comes with Android Market and supports almost all the applications on it. The UI supports multi-touch gestures in apps like the Gallery, Browser etc. It does very well on the hardware part too - 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 512 MB RAM, 2 GB internal memory, up to 32 GB microSD support etc.
Multimedia (4 out of 5)
The Acer Stream is perfectly suited for multimedia playback - it supports the H.264, XviD and WMV codecs by default. The video playback is flawless. It also has an HDMI port and DLNA so you can view your media on a bigger screen. It also has a 3.5 mm headphone jack so that you can plug in your favorite headphones.
It has a 5 MP camera which can take shots at a resolution of 2560 х 1920 pixels. The camera has autofocus but no flash. The image capture quality is pretty good. The camera interface is easy to use and offers all the usual customization options. it can record 720p video at 30 FPS in the MP4 format.
Connectivity (5 out of 5)
It has the whole range of connectivity options - GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with DLNA and UPnP. It also has Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 connectivity. It also has an FM radio with RDS and GPS transceiver with A-GPS support.
The Verdict (4 out of 5)
It is an excellent phone feature wise and should offer tough competition to phones like the HTC Evo 4G, Motorola Droid X and the Samsung Galaxy S. It definitely is a phone to look out for.
