Acer Stream

Acer's new high-end Android 2.1 handset has got multimedia fans firmly in its sights and has the tools for the job.  Indeed, the Stream has more or less the same hardware as the current leading smartphones.  So how is it going to stand out from the competition?  Is the Acer Touch interface up to the job?  Is it the ideal companion for your multimedia content?  Let's find out ...

Robust

The Stream has a rather stark look about it that makes it seem more like a business-orientated smartphone than a multimedia phone aimed at a wider audience.  Some of us immediately slipped out a sly 'well, it's an Acer phone ...',which says it all.  But then again, design and looks are always a matter of personal taste.  And the lack of individual style is counterbalanced by the more than acceptable build quality, which makes the Stream feel particularly solid.  The textured reverse side of the phone is particularly soft to the touch.


From a usability perspective, we were left wondering why there are so many traditional and touch-sensitive buttons.  The physical buttons are for controlling the media player (we've got it now: this is a multimedia phone), but do they really need to be there?  We didn't really use them, and they seem even more useless when you realise that you have to use the touchscreen interface for scrolling through different tracks.  The touch-sensitive controls, are, on the other hand, very, well, sensitive ... it's very easy to brush across them without meaning to.  The home screen button flashes when you have unread mails or messages.

You need to get used to handling such a wide handset, but then again, you need a substantial frame to get such a big capacitative touchscreen display in: 3.7'' and 800 x 480 pixels.  On the subject of the AMOLED screen, we were a little disappointed by how dim it was, which was especially a problem outside, as well as the lack of contrast.  We have to admit that with the new Super AMOLED and Retina displays, we've seen better, but even comparing it to another handset that uses the same technology, like the HTC Desire, the results are less impressive.



Acer Interface

Acer is keeping up to date and joining the current trend with the Stream by reworking Android with a new user interface that's supposed to offer a simplified, more logical interface, something that was missing from the Acer Liquid.  As with everything else, sometimes these attempts work well (like the HTC Sense interface) and sometimes they work less well, as the Acer Touch Interface demonstrates.  It didn't leave us feeling lost or confused-the interface is far from complicated-just plain frustrated.

Before unlocking the phone, several widgets are laid out across a series of home screens.  Some of them are useful and mean you can avoid unlocking the phone for certain information.


The notification area which informs you of incoming messages and the status of your connections is no longer a tab that you pull out from the top of the screen: instead, it's attached to the taskbar.  On several occasions, we had to tap two or three times to bring it back.

Once the phone is unlocked, you end up on a homescreen, half of which is taken up by a taskbar containing eight icons offering the apps of your choice.  That's fine, but that rather removes the need for a homescreen.  It's not that much a problem though, because you can't actually put your own apps onto this screen.  Nor can you add them to either of the other two!  Scrolling left opens up a list of recent actions-again, why not, that makes it easier to find them-while going right throws you straight into multimedia content (music, photos and video).  We would have much preferred several separate home screens that we could customise for different tasks.
Despite having an impressive 1 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, the handset often seemed held back when moving from one part of the interface to another.  Perhaps there's a problem with the way the interface is integrated with the Snapdragon hardware?  That's what it seems like anyway.  An update should certainly be able to correct fix that.  It's also possible to switch over to the 'classic' Android interface, but that too also drags its feet.

Multimedia

So what can the Touch do that other smartphones can't?  Like the rest of them it can shoot video (with no zoom, as we're used to), play back 720p films (with rather limited success), take photos using a 5 Megapixel camera, play music and surf the web (reasonably enough in this last case).  It can do all of that, and, as a bonus, has an HDMI output as well as the cable to go with it so you can connect it to a TV.  That's great, but who wants to watch jerky videos?  That also stops the touchscreen from working and leaves you to rely on the physical controls.

It's best not to be too demanding of the camera, which hardly produces decent photos.  Very few details are captured and low light levels are handled very badly.  The Stream doesn't stand up well to comparisons with the Galaxy S, which is hardly excellent itself.

The NemopPlayer software found on the Acer Liquid is back.  It's compatible with XviD and H.264 video at 720p, but not DivX, which needs requires conversion first, unlike on the Samsung Galaxy S, for instance.

Battery life is a little tight for a phone that puts so much emphasis on multimedia.  You can expect it to last hardly longer than a day and a half if you make regular-but not intensive-use of it for e-mails, text messages, web browsing, video, music, radio, photos and phone calls.