Video: Acer Liquid Jade Android Phone Review

When it comes to Android Phones there are plenty to choose from and in the mid to budget range there are a ton of options. The Acer Liquid Jade is £199 smart phone running Android 4.4 .2 (KitKat) with a Mediatek 1.3GHz quad-core processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage and in this video I will take a look at the phone. It has dual SIM support via a combined SIM/MicroSD card slot, you can either have a single SIM card and MicroSD card or dual SIMs without a MicroSD card so you have to sacrifices the SD card if you want dual SIMs. When you do put your SIM card in you will notice there is no 4G support.

My first impression of the phone is that it is really light for a 5 inch phone, I have a Nexus 5 and the Jade feels a lot lighter feels a lot thinner than the Google device. It has a plastic back which is a bit of a finger print management and has a large bump for the camera. I actually liked the feel of the device, it’s light and doesn’t feel cheap.

The display is 5 inch running at 720p and doesn’t look as sharp as some of the 1080p displays but doesn’t look that bad and the brightness is decent, it has a coating on it which Acer say keeps off finger prints and it actually works pretty well. The CPU performance is like the display, reasonable but not outstanding. You can switch from app to app without too much lag but some larger app where a little slow to open initially.

There are two cameras on the Jade, there is a 2MP front camera and a 13MP rear camera. The camera is very good for the price and there are plenty of options for controlling the shot. There are panoramas modes, HDR and other special modes. As you can see from the photos they look pretty good:

One of the things I least like with Android is bloatware and skins that slow down the OS. Acer don’t add to many layers on top of standard Android which is a good thing, I am happy with standard Android and the light changes in this build are fine and don’t bog it down. As far as bloatware there are lots of extras installed, AcerNav and Acer streaming apps which duplicate functionally of other Android apps and aren’t necessary.

As you can see in the video it’s not a bad choice for a mid-range Android phone (around £200), personally I prefer Windows Phone but I know that this isn’t an option for many people. Have a look at the video and see what you think.