Acer Liquid Leap review

Acer’s first attempt at a wearable is a budget-friendly smart band that might not set pulses racing with its design or limited feature set, but it does have one advantage for smartphone fence-sitters; the Liquid Leap will play nicely with both Apple and Android smartphones. 

Design 

With its simple looks, rubberised plastic construction and monochrome LCD display, the Leap is an undeniably plain device. The only bit of visual flare is a strip of brushed metal across one side of the screen, but this makes the whole unit seem unbalanced. It also doesn’t do anything, and feels just as cheap as the underlying plastic.

The Leap is only available in one fits-all size, and the strap isn’t interchangeable, meaning you can’t mix and match colours or seek out an alternative band if the original breaks. Our white review unit got rather grubby after a few weeks of constant use, although the black model may fare better over time. Our biggest irritation is the awkward push-pin strap, which is very awkward to fasten with one hand. On more than one occasion it fell off our wrist because we hadn’t fastened it fully.

Screen

For the most part, however, you’re going to be paying more attention to the screen than to the strap. It’s a 0.9in, 128x32 resolution OLED display that has exceptional viewing angles, meaning you can read text clearly without having you tilt your wrist to an uncomfortable position. The resolution might not be huge, but it’s enough to clearly display telephone numbers, draw simple icons and show the time without having to lift your wrist up to your face. 

Acer claims screen brightness is around 70lux, which is roughly 23nits - that’s a tenth the brightness of the average smartphone display, although because it purely displays white text on a black background it’s easy enough to read in all lighting conditions. 

It’s a shame that the black screen bezels take up more space than the screen itself, leaving little room for notification text. When email notifications arrived, we would frequently only be able to see the name of the sender. It was a similar situation with Twitter - each notification begins with the word Twitter rather than an icon, leaving little room for the message itself.

Features

The Leap doesn’t use the accelerometer to work out when you’re raising your wrist to use the device - the screen will only illuminate when you tap it, in order to conserve battery. Frustratingly, tapping to wake doesn’t work a good portion of the time, you often have to tap multiple times before it finally springs to life.

There’s no way to change what appears when the screen first wakes, meaning you’re always shown the time (plus a low battery warning if you’re running out of juice). You can swipe to the left to see the number of steps you’ve taken so far that day, the distance travelled, number of calories burned and the number of active minutes. Swipe left again, or swipe right on the initial screen and an Apps icon appears.

It’s here that you can engage sleep mode, view previously received notifications, enter a Settings menu to flip the screen for left or right-handed use, and control music playback on a paired smartphone. Unsurprisingly, there’s no way to interact with notifications, meaning you’ll eventually have to reach for your phone if you want to call someone back or reply to a text. Music controls are also so fiddly that it’s easier just to grab your phone from your pocket. With no way to change what appears when you wake the screen, you have to swipe, tap to enter the Apps menu, swipe to reach the second screen of icons, select Music and then change tracks or pause playback. 

Fitness tracking

It’s perhaps no surprise in a sub-£70 device that there isn’t any kind of heart rate monitoring, but it does somewhat limit the Leap’s abilities as a fitness gadget. Instead it relies on accelerometer data to track your steps and distance travelled, based on the length of your gait as configured in the companion app. 

It calculates calories burned in a similar fashion, using health metrics like gender, age, height and weight. However, step counts weren’t as accurate as other fitness trackers we’ve used, often over-estimating our steps by as much as 1,000 per day - meaning calorie counts and distances were off as well.

The Leap can technically track your sleeping patterns, although this is merely a timer you activate at night and disable in the morning. It’s nowhere near as useful as the automatic sleep tracking built into most FitBit fitness trackers, and there’s not even a shortcut to activate it quickly.

Acer Leap Manager companion app

The Liquid Leap has its own companion app for both iOS and Android, to help you get connected, adjust the band’s settings and keep track of your fitness progress over time. Your data is saved to a profile, meaning you can take it with you across multiple devices, although you can’t be signed in to two devices simultaneously and the app doesn’t autofill your username and password, which is irritating.

It’s a shame the app is so basic on iOS, with no options to limit what notifications get sent to the device - only the ability to toggle calls, texts and meetings. We eventually had to switch to an Android device, as there was no way to stop our regular stream of Twitter notifications. Thankfully Android is much more involved, with options to allow notifications on a per-app basis. You can also set a vibrating alarm through the app, should you want a smoother way to wake up in the mornings.

The rest of the app is still rather limited, with simple bar graphs showing your progress over time but no way to track exercise or workouts other than walking/running, no training advice and no community aspects for sharing your performance on social networks. Even the Tips section is nothing more than a link to the user manual in PDF form.

Charging and Battery life

Battery life is one of the Leap’s more positive aspects. It will last for at least four days on a single charge, with five or six being typical during our time with the device. It only takes an hour or two to recharge fully, so leaving it in its cradle overnight will guarantee you’re at full capacity when you wake up in the morning - although that will of course mean an evening without sleep tracking.

The cradle itself completely surrounds the device, clipping in place with a locking mechanism to ensure the charging terminals are making contact. It uses a standard microUSB connector, although the supplied cable is very short. Acer doesn’t include a mains adapter in the box either, so you’ll either have to use the one that came with your smartphone or plug the Leap into a PC’s USB port to recharge it.

Conclusion

The Liquid Leap is Acer’s “me too” attempt to join in on the craze for wearable technology. Beyond some incredibly basic smartphone features, there’s little here to separate it from any other smartband. It may be relatively inexpensive, but it feels cheap, is frustrating to use and isn’t much better than a smartphone app at tracking your daily exercise. Though it doesn't have a screen or smartwatch-style extras, we would still recommend the FitBit Flex over the Leap every time.