Acer’s E110 is a budget Android phone that serves as a cheaper counterpart to phones from its higher-end Liquid series. Read on to see how it fares in our review.
What we like
The Acer E110 comes with five homescreens waiting to be customised with app shortcuts and widgets. The social networking essentials Facebook and Twidroid (Twitter) come pre-loaded here along with the Spinlets music streaming app.
We last saw Spinlets on the Acer Liquid and we’re pleased to see that Acer has expanded the catalogue of music from what was previously on offer. Music from both Spinlets and your own library sounds good on the Acer E110, which thankfully includes a 3.5mm jack so you can enjoy your music on your normal headphones.
The sync control for mounting the SD card is a nice process. We liked the nuts and bolts styling of the animated menu and the fact that the the sync controls aren’t buried in maze-like menu screens. From the same place, you can also opt to turn the Acer E110 into a USB modem which could come in very handy.
Call quality on the Acer E110 is fine. We tested it out next to a busy road and conversations were still audible with no noticeable distortion.
The 3-megapixel camera works fast and takes pictures quickly. There’s no shutter key on the phone but the touchscreen control works just fine. You get a range of colour effects such as sepia, green, blue and red filters as well as negative and monochrome. There are controls for white balance lighting and night mode, which mitigates the absence of a flash somewhat.
What we don’t like
The Acer E110 is an Android phone without access to the Android Market or any of the other Google features like Maps or Search. For a phone running on Google’s own OS we think this is a pretty major exclusion.
The screen isn’t terribly responsive or easy to use. Sometimes you have to press menu options two or three times to get that confirmation buzz. This obviously leads to typo-city when it comes to texting. This is one of the points where not being able to access the Android Market (where you’d be able to download a different keyboard) becomes really apparent.
As the Acer E110 has a resistive touchscreen instead of capacitive it might be easier to use a stylus to text. The handset doesn’t come with one, unfortunately, so you may want to consider picking one up separately.
The screen’s resolution is also very low. Menus look fuzzy and blocky and colours have a washed out feel. In this respect it reminded us of the first colour screen phones from yesteryear. The screen really doesn’t do the Acer E110’s camera justice. Pictures taken on the Acer E110 look much better on a computer screen, making it fine for Facebook pics.
The lack of Wi-Fi really limits the internet and social networking capabilities of the E110. Facebook and Spinlets in particular suffer the most. The news feeds and statuses took ages to load up on Facebook and Spinlets crashed twice before we even got a note of music out of it. Even when it did start playing music it only got twenty seconds into a Billy Talent song before it had to stop to load the rest of the track. A real let down.
Conclusion
The Acer E110 is really let down by the unresponsiveness of its touchscreen. The call quality is fine but the touchscreen turns texting the shortest of messages into a real task. We recommend you check out the Acer Liquid and the Acer Liquid E instead.
Specification
| OS | Android |
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