The Acer Stream is the company’s second high end Android smartphone – you might have seen the first, the Acer Liquid, splashed all over billboards around the country recently. While it’s still toting a Snapdragon core, this time around, there’s an AMOLED screen and some other high end gear. Is that enough to oust smartphone stalwarts HTC and Samsung from the top spot? Find out in our full Acer Stream review right here.
Read the rest of our Acer Stream review
Acer Stream review: Android 2.1
Acer Stream review: Build and touchscreen
Acer Stream review: Multimedia
On paper at least, the Acer Stream ought to go toe to toe with the HTC Desire. Like HTC’s handset, it boasts a WVGA, 3.7-inch AMOLED screen, a five megapixel camera and a 1GHz Snapdragon processor. It goes beyond that however by adding in 2GB of internal storage, and a HDMI out port for pumping video through to a telly.
Unfortunately, in the hand, the Acer Stream is nowhere near as handsome as the HTC Desire, which in its turn looks downright homely compared to the HTC Legend and Evo 4G in the US. While not especially thick, it’s still the most disappointingly built top end Android smartphone since the original T-Mobile G1, now that we think of it.
The screen itself is as vivid as you’d expect for an AMOLED panel and reasonably responsive, but it’s deeply recessed, and inside a thick black bezel, which gives it a cheap feel, especially compared to the iPhone 4’s display, which looks like it’s painted on to the top of the shell. And the outer casing feels hard, sharp and regrettably boring. Add to that the three unnecessary physical buttons for controlling media below the screen of the Acer Stream (Here’s a hint Acer, put them on the side of the phone), and you’ve got one cluttered, clunky phone.
Hardware of course, almost takes a backseat to the software in smartphones today, and while we generally love Android 2.1, Acer’s custom take on it on the Acer Stream is sadly more than a tad disappointing – not to mention insane.
We didn’t have anything against Acer’s software skin on top of Android 1.6 on the Acer Liquid when we reviewed early this year. It was subtle, and overall, helpful. Unfortunately, the UI it’s slapped across the top of Eclair on the Acer Stream however is out and out bonkers, and utterly confusing. It’s the strangest one we’ve seen yet on an Android phone, and while it sports a few nice touches, we have to wonder whether Acer is putting something in the water cooler at its software labs: it feels like the smartphone equivalent of a jumble sale.
We go into much more detail in the Android 2.1 section of our Acer Stream review, but to give you an example: for some baffling reason, Acer decided to move the notification bar, which you typically pull down from the top of the screen on Android, to the middle of the homescreen, and the bottom of every other app – which as you might imagine is very annoying when you’re browsing and scrolling on the browser. That’s just one of a long list of strange navigation twists and turns, and after playing with it for several days, we’re still not sure there’s any method in the madness.
On the plus side, the Acer Stream is a respectable multimedia Android phone. The five megapixel camera boasts 720p HD video recording, and plenty of options for tweaking shots, and it’s gone above and beyond to add extra format support than what Google natively offers for video playback. Both MP4s and DivX/Xvid AVIs played incredibly smoothly on it, and we had no problems whatsoever streaming them to a PlayStation 3 hooked up to our TV over Wi-Fi.
But of course, the same is true of the Samsung Galaxy S (And the free Roku Player app brings wide format support to a lot of Google phones too), and that’s why we can’t recommend the Acer Stream. Its only real advantage over Samsung’s super blower is a slightly better battery life for about fifty quid less unlocked. While its looks belie a reasonably modern, if mental, OS, it’s nowhere near enough to stand out from the crowd.
Acer Stream review sample provided by Expansys
Read the rest of our Acer Stream review
Acer Stream review: Android 2.1
Acer Stream review: Build and touchscreen
Acer Stream review: Multimedia
