You have to hand it to Acer. Since the company turned its attention to producing Android handsets, their offerings have been decent, well-priced smartphones. Not exceptional, but decent enough. Mind you, it looked like the phone manufacturer had upped the ante with its recent Acer Liquid Metal and could be getting set to take on the likes of HTC and Samsung. So has it managed to continue this trend with the Acer Liquid Mini?

First impressions

You should be able to tell from its name that the Acer Liquid Mini is a tad small. But despite its diminutive dimensions, it still manages to squeeze in a 3.2in capacitive touch-screen and offer a virtual QWERTY keyboard that can be used in both landscape and portrait mode. It's obvious that Acer has put a lot of stock in the Liquid Mini's appearance. There are curved edges on the sides and top of the handset, and while our review model came in shiny piano black, you can also choose a handset in something more eye-catching, such as pink, green, blue and silver. The screen isn't quite so eye-catching, as it only has 256K colours.

The display is also not as responsive as you might hope. While Acer has gone for the more expensive capacitive type of screen rather than the resistive kind, we did find it suffered from a touch of lag - which may well be down to its 600MHz chip. Another complaint (although bear in mind that the Liquid Mini's price is very reasonable) we experienced a slight lag between pressing a feature's icon and it actually coming to life. And because you only get haptic feedback if you're using the virtual QWERTY keyboard and the four touch-keys under the screen, sometimes you have a moment where you're not sure if your key press has been recognised or not.

History feed

The Liquid Mini may be an Android handset, but Acer has made its own mark on it. On the homepage, for instance, you'll find six shortcut icons along the bottom of the display; you can change these depending on what you use most. But what we really liked was the way that if you swipe from left to right, you'll be rewarded with a list of thumbnails showing the most recently used web pages and applications. It makes it really easy make a call to someone you just phoned, take another look at your directions on Google Maps, or take another look at an article you were reading online.

And while we're mentioning Google Maps, we must say we were most impressed with the sat nav offering. It's possible to view maps in various ways, such as satellite or terrain - but our favourite feature was the 3D affect, which along with the accurate A-GPS and digital compass, made sure we found our way perfectly.

Web browsing

Surfing the net was mostly hassle-free, apart from the odd time when a text bar (Google search, for instance) would get covered up by the popup QWERTY keyboard. That meant we had to type blind, and were unable to check on what we had input. Just like on the Acer Liquid Metal, Acer's own Social Jogger merges Twitter and Facebook feeds into a single stream that is shown on a virtual wheel.

The snapper has five megapixels and offers lots of settings to help you get your shots right before you even press the shutter. Once the pictures are taken, though, you can't do much in the way of editing before you upload them onto your favourite social networking site.

The verdict

The Acer Liquid Mini doesn't live up to the standards of the Acer Liquid Metal, but it does still fly the flag for the manufacturer and its reputation of offering, decent, well-priced smartphones. If you want an affordable, pocket-friendly smartphone, then it's worth considering the Acer Liquid Mini.