2012-12-21-393

Acer Announces Wave Of New Products For 2011

Even though the company is known more for its bargain computing devices such as notebooks, netbooks and desktop PCs, Acer still maintains a presence in the global smartphone market, brought about by its popular Acer Liquid line of Android-powered smartphones.

However, it is also quite apparent that the Liquid is in some serious need of a product refresh, which is exactly what Acer has delivered with its latest announcement: a new 4.8-inch smartphone which is slated for launch next year in April.

Details about the new smartphone are somewhat sparse, as Acer has not disclosed anything more about the device other than some basic hardware specifications. The press release claims that, in addition to the 4.8-inch display, the device sports a “powerful 1GHz Snapdragon processor”, which puts it at the high-end portion of the smartphone market. In addition, the smartphone will come with two built-in cameras: an 8-megapixel rear camera with LED flash and a front-facing camera which supports a more modest resolution of 2 megapixels.

However, the key selling point of Acer’s new smartphone appears to be its display. While it is only 4.8-inches wide, Acer claims that the 21:9 screen is capable of displaying information at a maximum resolution of up to 1024 x 480. This puts it remarkably close to the standard resolution typically found in the 10-inch netbooks, which sport native resolutions of 1024 x 600. From the looks of it, Acer is clearly gunning for a phone that is capable of pushing out some serious multimedia entertainment.

Connectivity-wise, the new Acer smartphone also boasts some decent wireless support: built-in support for HDSPA @ 14.4 and WiFi N comes standard in the handset, while short-range wireless communication is achieved via Bluetooth 3.0 support.

Also, you might have realized that we made no mention about the ‘Liquid’ name throughout our description of the new smartphone. This is not due to oversight: rather, it appears that Acer had been rather particular about not using the ‘Liquid’ name in its press release. And the only reason we could think of for Acer’s behavior is that the new smartphone is probably supposed to be part of another product line which is replacing the Liquid series.

Oh, and one more thing. The fact that Acer’s new smartphone will only be released sometime in April next year strongly hints at a possible Gingerbread installation as the device’s stock OS. But we will have to wait and see.

Reference: Akihabara News