Acer hasn’t had any luck in the mobile industry, but every year, the company comes out swinging at the annual Computex with some new tablets. This year, however, the company is making a foray into the smartphone market. Acer has announced the Liquid S1 smartphone, or as the company called it, a phablet.
The Liquid S1 is rocking a 5.7-inch 1280 x 720 pixel display, making it bigger than the top-selling phablet, the Galaxy Note II. Running on that huge display, we’ve got a near stock build of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, which is very nice. The only modifications, from what we can see, are just some Acer widgets. Powering this beast is a 1.5GHz quad-core Mediatek chip with 1GB of RAM. With the device, Acer is really looking to push the cloud and using cloud storage.
The device will come with AcerCloud Docs pre-installed, which allows documents in the cloud to be sent, viewed, and edited from the device itself. Love or hate the cloud, it’s clear that it will become a pretty big part of all smartphones moving forward.
The Liquid S1 also features a software modification called Float User Interface that brings up a “Float Apps” shortcut by pressing a key. This allows for an app to be seen and operated while it is floating over the rest of the user interface. Acer calls it a “ghost mode,” but points out that at launch, it will only be compatible with a few apps, including maps, calculator, notes, and your main camera. “Float Caller” is an off-shoot of this feature that makes a pop-up appear when a call is received that lets you to answer the call, dismiss it, or reply to it with a short message.
The Liquid S1 has a front facing camera with an 88-degree wide viewing angle, a 24mm lens, and a buttonless shooting mode that allows you to say “cheese” to snap an image. For some reason, however, Acer has omitted information regarding the rear facing camera. Other specs include dual-SIM card slots, LTE, 8GB of storage, a microSD card slot, and a 2400mAh battery.
Do you think Acer has a chance to capture a portion of the smartphone market with the Liquid S1? Let us know down in the comments!