Acer launched the Liquid E700 smartphone with triple SIM support last month. Apart from the triple SIM support, the smartphone comes with several attractive features such as LED flash for the front-facing camera and a huge 3500mAh battery. Is it worth the price of Rs. 11,999? Let us find out in the complete review.
Unboxing
We unboxed the Liquid E700 recently, check out the unboxing.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oDZ_8HEHDw
Box Contents
- Acer Liquid E700 smartphone in Black
- In-ear earphones with microphone
- Micro USB Cable
- 2-pin Charger
- Quick Start guide and other booklets
Display, Hardware and Design
The Liquid E700 has a 5-inch display with a pixel resolution of 1280 x 720 and a pixel density of around 294 PPI. It is bright, offers vibrant colors, has good viewing angles and the sunlight legibility is good too. Overall the display is pretty good for the price. The smartphone has huge bezels around the display and a small chin below the capacitive touch buttons, making it taller than other 5-inch smartphones at 147.3mm. It is 73mm wide, which is acceptable. Even though the smartphone has plastic body, the build quality is solid.
Another interesting addition is LED flash for the 2-megapixel front-facing camera that helps you capture better selfies in dark. There is a LED notification light too on the back of the earpiece grill. This glows in green, red and blue colors. Again, there is a bezel between the earpiece and the display, showing off Acer branding.
The capacitive touch buttons are present on a bezel, below the display. These touch buttons are not backlit, but offer haptic feedback when pressed. There is a loudspeaker grill on the chin, below the bezel.
The micro USB slot and the volume rockers are present on the right side of the smartphone. It is 9.9 mm thick.
The power button is awkwardly place on the top on this tall smartphone, which makes it hard to access it. The 3.5mm audio jack is also present on the top. There is a primary microphone hole on the bottom and the left side is blank without any keys.
The back cover has smooth matte finish, which is prone to smudges. There is a 8-megpixel camera on the back with LED flash and a secondary microphone. There is a AcerRAPID key below the camera module that lets you launch the camera or any other preferred app. Since the smartphone has DTS audio support, there is DTS branding on the back.
Once you open the back cover, you can see three micro SIM slots and a micro SD card slot. The smartphone has a huge 3500mAh built-in battery.
Camera
Coming to the camera, the 8-megapixel rear camera captures decent images in bright daylight and even macro shots are good, but low-light shots are poor and grainy. Most low-light images came out blurry. Even images with flash had a lot of noise. HDR shots doesn’t come out well if you shake the phone even a bit. The camera UI has custom skin, compared to the standard camera MediaTek UI. It even has a Smart de-noise feature, which slightly improves the contrast of the image, but it doesn’t remove the noise. Even the front-facing camera is just average and the tiny LED flash on the front is not too bright for capturing selfies in completely dark conditions. The front camera can record videos at 720p HD resolution.
It has several capture modes such as HDR,Panorama, Beautification, Best Shot, Bright Magic, Smile Shutter, AEB, Multi angle view and more. There are different scene modes such as Auto, Landscape, Night, Portrait and Night portrait. It even has some effects. Check out the camera samples below. (Click the image for full resolution pictures).
Daylight
Check out the complete set of Acer Liquid E700 camera samples here.
It can record videos at 1080p resolution at 30fps. Video is also average. Check out the video sample below.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kA-uMnLXcM
Software
Coming to the software, the Acer Liquid E700 runs on Android 4.4.2 (KitKat) with custom UI on top. It has different icons and the quick settings are different compared to most other MediaTek-powered smartphones. In the quick settings, there are five toggles in the first row that can be swapped with 10 toggles in the other rows. Some toggles such as flash light is useful.
The lockscreen also has weather widget and some shortcuts to apps. You can drag these icons to launch them from the lock screen quickly. The AcerRAPID key lets you launch the camera by long pressing the key, even if the screen is locked. You can customize the app to launch for short press.
It has floating apps that lets you place an app in the form of floating window in the homescreen. These apps include, Browser, Notes, Timer, Calculator, Stopwatch and more. The floating apps menu can be launched by pressing the recent/multitasking button.
Out of 2GB of RAM, you get 1969MB of usable RAM, out of which about 1.4MB of RAM is free when some apps are running in the background. Out of 16GB of internal storage, you get about 12.43GB of user storage.
You can set the default write disk to SD card and also move compatible apps to the SD card.
Apps
It comes with a lot of apps. Apart from the usual set of Google Play and utility apps, the smartphone comes with Acer SnapNote, AcerCloud, Docs, LiveScreen and Polaris Office 5.
Music Player and FM Radio
The Music Player has a custom interface and has DTS support that enhances the audio experience for both the video and audio. Audio through the loudspeaker and bundled earphones are decent. The FM Radio has the usual MediaTek UI and comes with auto search and recording options. It can play 1080p full HD videos smoothly.
Triple SIM and Connectivity
It has triple SIM support with three micro SIM slots. All the SIM cards support 3G, but you can enable 3G on only one SIM, while the other is on 2G. The connectivity features include, 3G, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth v4.0 with A2DP and GPS. It has USB on-the-go (OTG) support too.
Performance and Benchmarks
It is powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6582 processor with ARM Cortex A7 cores and Mali 400 GPU. The performance is decent. Since it has 2GB RAM multitasking was smooth, but some tasks like floating apps did lag a bit since the UI takes up more RAM. Check out some benchmark charts below.
Quadrant Benchmark
It scored 7347 points in the Quadrant benchmark.
AnTuTu Benchmark 4
It scored 17491 points in the AnTuTu Benchmark 4.
Vellamo 2.0 HTML5
It scored 1952 points in the Vellamo 2 HTML5 browser benchmark. Check out the complete set of Acer Liquid E700 Benchmarks here. We tried several games, and those did not lag, but the graphics is not up to the mark. We will be adding the gaming review video soon, so that you can get a clear idea about the gaming performance of the smartphone in detail.
Battery life
Coming to battery life, the 3500mAh battery lasts for more than a day with mixed use, including video playback, few hours of music, few calls and some gaming. With minimal use, it will last for more than 2 days. Based on my average use with all the three SIM cards on use and about 4 hours of screen time, battery dropped to 12% after 27 hours 44 minutes of usage. If you are a heavy user, it should last a whole day, even with all the three SIM cards.
It achieved 14 hours and 41 minutes in our One Charge rating, which is pretty good. You can check out the Acer Liquid E700 battery test results to know more about the smartphone’s battery life in detail.
Conclusion
At a price tag of Rs. 11,999, the Acer Liquid E700 is a decent smartphone in the range and comes with several hardware and software features. The major disappointment is the camera, which is below average especially due to poor low-light performance. If you are looking for an Android smartphone with triple SIM support, but can compromise on the camera, go for it. To summarize, check out the pros and cons of the smartphone below.
Pros
- Good display
- Brilliant Battery life
- Triple SIM support
Cons
- Average performance
- Average camera
- UI is not impressive