This weekend we're taking part in the Acer Liveblog Challenge in Edinburgh. Armed with an Acer Aspire Switch 10, an Iconia Tab 8 tablet, a Liquid Jade smartphone and Acer's brand new Liquid Leap smartband, we'll be taking to the streets of Scotland's capital to complete a series of challenges throughout the day, all of which will be detailed here. We'll be updating this article regularly as the day progresses, so make sure to keep checking back to see what we've been getting up to.
8.20PM: ACER LIQUID LEAP REVIEW - HANDS ON
The Liquid Leap is Acer's new wearable. Part smartwatch, part fitness band, the Leap tells the time, counts your steps, keeps track of how far you've walked, how many calories you've burned, how long you've been exercising for and your various sleep patterns. It also shows you any incoming call and text notifications, meetings in your calendar and you can use it to control music playing on your smartphone.
With so many different functions under its belt, the Leap is an incredibly versatile device. It's slim, too, measuring just over a centimetre in width. You could almost say it was the wearable to end all wearables, as its wide range of features and minimalist design puts other bulky Android Wear watches such as the Moto 360 and LG G Watch R to shame.
However, the Liquid Leap still has a long way to go before it's anywhere near as easy to use as its competitors, as its tiny 0.9in 128x32 resolution display is very fiddly to use. It takes two firm taps to activate the display, but even then it sometimes completely fails to register your touch. This often meant we were thumping the screen quite forcefully before it lit up, which isn't exactly very user-friendly when you only want to check the time in a hurry. Unlike its rivals, it doesn't automatically turn on when you lift your wrist up either, so you're forced to tap the screen whenever you want to check something.
It takes a bit of manouevring to get the Leap on your wrist as well, as its push-in buttons are quite tricky to secure. You also have to make sure the Leap's silver strip is on the lower side of the band and is facing towards you, otherwise some of its icons will appear upside-down. There is an option to flip the screen so you can wear the Leap on both wrists, but this won't help to flip the icons round the right way if you're wearing the band the wrong way up. Instead, it only mirrors the screen horizontally, so everything's still upside down unless you take the band off and try and again.
This makes using the Leap a bit of a hassle overall, particularly as it's so hard to get on, but we certainly appreciate its multiple streams of information. While you can view the vast majority of the information on the Leap itself, all the data feeds back into the Acer Leap Manager app on your phone. Here you can see all your daily activity in one place, with colourful circle diagrams showing you how far you've got to go before completing your various goals as well as how much battery life it's got left.
Acer claims the Leap can last up to a week on a single charge, but we think that may be a bit optimistic. In twelve hours of use, we depleted the battery by about 20 per cent, so five days is probably a more likely figure in our eyes, but even this is a significant improvement on the 24-48 hour battery lives of larger Android Wear devices.
The Leap has potential, but we think it's overly fussy design and temperamental touchscreen could be its undoing. We'll have a full review of the device up shortly, so make sure you check back during the week to read our final verdict.
5.15PM: ACER LIQUID JADE REVIEW - HANDS-ON
There's no denying the Liquid Jade is a great looking phone. Measuring a mere 7.5mm thick and weighing just 110g, the phone is much lighter than your average 5in handset. This makes it incredibly comfortable to hold, not least because of its smooth, curved rear chassis, but its glossy finish means it does pick up a ridiculous amount of fingerprints.
A lightweight chassis isn't always a good thing, though, as the Liquid Jade does feel significantly more flimsy than other 5in handsets we've tested. The rear plastic chassis also has a very slight amount of flex in it.
The 5in screen only has a 1,280x720 resolution, but text still looked perfectly sharp. We'll have to wait until we get our hands on a full review sample before we really put the phone's screen quality to the test, but when we put it side by side with a 5in AMOLED screen, whites looked much cleaner on the Liquid Jade than they did on the AMOLED screen. This is partly because the Liquid Jade's IPS display had a much cooler colour palette than our warmer AMOLED display, but the downside of this was that primary colours in particular looked a little washed out. Blacks were also visibly greyer when both screens were on full brightness, but this is to be expected on an IPS panel.
Performance-wise, the Liquid Jade's quad-core 1.3GHz Mediatek MT6582 processor and 1GB of RAM is roughly on par with Motorola's 2nd Generation Moto G. It scored 1,415ms in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks, which isn't bad for a £170 handset, but its graphics performance was much worse, scoring just 3,153 (or an average of 17fps) in the 3DMark Ice Storm test.
We're not big fans of the Liquid Jade's keyboard either, as it mistaking our taps for spaces or different letters. This made typing out tweets and messages a little frustrating, but luckily, the built-in Swype gestures function meant we could simply drag our finger over the each letter continuously instead of tapping them out individually. This was much more accurate and a lot faster, too.
The Acer Liquid Jade isn't perfect, then, but it's still a decent budget smartphone. We suspect it won't surpass the 2nd Gen Moto G to claim the crown for best budget smartphone, but we'll bring you our final verdict once we've got our hands on a full review sample.
12:45PM: INDOOR PHOTOGRAPY AT THE CAMERA OBSCURA
The Camera Obscura isn't just about seeing the Edinburgh cityscape from the top of the tower - there's also a huge exhibition dedicated to optical illusions, so we took the Liquid Jade in to see how it handled indoor photography and low lighting conditions. It fared relatively well considering the dim exhibition rooms, but as you can see from the photo above, it had trouble focusing on objects and faces in the foreground.
^ Photos in very low lighting conditions were full of noise, but this isn't particularly surprising
Even in better lighting conditions, photos were still a little blurry around the edges. The edges of the mirror were particularly fuzzy in the photo above, but they're still suitable for uploading to social media sites.
11.30AM: SPELL THE WORD 'ACER' IN FRONT OF EDINBURGH CASTLE
This was going to be a slight problem when our group only had three people, but we decided to use the power of technology to help us out. As you can see from the photo above, we used an Iconia Tab 8 and the Liquid Jade (and an errant iPhone 6 Plus) to photograph one letter at a time before taking a group shot of all the devices spelling out 'Acer'.
The Iconia Tab 8 only has a 5-megapixel rear camera, so the picture quality wasn't fantastic. While the weather was fairly cloudy and overcast, skin tones looked very patchy and pixellated, and the brickwork of Edinbugh Castle wasn't particularly detailed.
The Liquid Jade, on the other hand, has a 13-megapixel rear camera, so photos looked much crisper and packed with detail. Despite the distance, the castle brickwork looked pin sharp and the cloudy sky was much better exposed.
9:25AM: UNBOXING THE ACER LIQUID JADE
The Liquid Jade is Acer's latest smartphone. With its curved 5in IPS display, it's a gorgeous looking handset, and it's wonderfully thin, measuring just 7.5mm thick and weighing a featherweight 110g. The screen only has a 1,280x720 resolution, but it's powered by a quad-core 1.3GHz Mediatek MT6582 processor and 1GB of RAM. Running Android 4.4 with dual-SIM capabilities, it has 8GB of storage which can be expanded up to 32GB with a microSD card, a 13-megapixel camera on the back, a 2-megapixel camera on the front and a 2,100mAh battery.
