Yesterday, I looked at the hardware design of the phone and today I am going to take a closer look at the software package.

This is the home screen that you are shown after turning on for the first time. I have installed the Acer Liquid Leap manager SmartBand app.

The lock screen has shortcut options and in practice swiping anyone of them works really smoothly.

The notification settings options are the usual affair, but with a shortcut for the torch. Always handy to have that option close to hand.

I mentioned yesterday Acer offer BYOC. Bring Your Own Cloud. This enables you to use your own PC as a cloud sycning solution for your music, photos, videos, files and documents. Each one of these options has its own app as you will see below in the screen shots.

Apart from BYOC apps, Acer also include Acer Nav which is powered by TomTom. Handy.

Acer do not add much bloatware to the phone. Chrome is the only web browser. Google Play is the music player. Consequently, out of the 16gb storage, just over 12gb is available.

In terms of other apps, a FM radio, Easy Hotspot, File Manager, Livescreen, Polaris Office 5 (editing too), Power Save, QuickMode, System Doctor and Flash Light are added and not much more.

The Quick Mode app is rather good. It allows you to select from 3 easier to use home screen modes. In basic mode you get a list of apps on the home screen maximum. All accessing settings is password protected as it is for the other Quick modes. See screen shot below.

Easy mode is similar but with large icons on home screen that scrolls up and can have more items added.See screen shot below.

And lastly standard mode makes the icons smaller on the home screen but again with restricted access. All in all, I think Acer did a good job adding just enough, but also creating some easier to use home screen modes.

Acer have also add a few of their own widgets.

With plenty of widgets for the time and weather!

In terms of operation the processor powering the phone does not seem to impact performance. It is a smooth affair moving from app to app. Antutu scoring revealed it only had one quarter of the performance versus the Note 4. And yet you would not know it in real life. Riptide GP2 played just fine. Call quality was ok too. The power button is on the top of the phone. This is not the best placement due to the height of the phone. The rear of the phone is a fingerprint magnet.

Tomorrow I will look at the camera and audio in more depth. If you have any questions, please let me ask in the comments or on social media in the usual places.

Look above at the photos. What you have is a slim svelte looking device. One of the first things I do with any new phone is pass it over to my wife and ask for her opinion. My wife has no real interest in technology but her first words were “this looks nice and feels comfortable in the hand”.

The official specifications are –

– Processor – MediaTek Octa-core 1.50 GHz
– Screen – 5″ 1280 x 720p
– Camera – 13 Megapixel (Rear Camera) with flash f/1.8, 5 Megapixel (Front Camera)
– RAM – 2 GB RAM
– Storage – 16gb (12gb usable)
– Sensors – Accelerometer, Ambient Light Sensor, Proximity Sensor, eCompass
– Nano sim x 2 (sim 2 can be up to 32gb micro sd card or nano sim)
– FM Radio included
– Android KitKat 4.4
– Radios – EDGE, GPRS,HSPA+,LTE
– Bluetooth – Bluetooth 4.0
– Wireless LAN
– NFC not included
– Battery Talk Time 6 Hour
– Battery Standby Time 250 Hour
– Physical Characteristics Colour Black
– Dimensions – Height 143mm,Width 69 mm, Depth 7.8 mm
– Weight 104g
– In the box – AC Adaptor, USB Cable,HeadSet,Quick Start Guide

The Acer Jade S comes with LTE at a top speed of 150Mbps, its 7.78mm thick, Gorilla Glass 3 and a 13mp f/1.8 rear camera. I actually weighed the phone as it felt really light and at 104g the scales proved that point spot on. Because of its curve the phone looks even thinner than 7.78mm. It fits completely inside my front shirt work pocket which is a bonus. This is also the dual sim. It can either take 2 nano sims or one sim and up to a 32gb micro sd card.

So after a good charge, I powered on the phone. First there was a 50mb software update to improve the camera and some bug fixes. Always a good sign. The next step was asking whether I wanted to use the phone internet connection via wifi or wifi and mobile data. Ideal if this was a Pay As You Go phone. I was then asked to sign into my wireless internet, Google account and offered to create an ACER BYOC account. What is BYOC. Bring Your Own Cloud. More about this over the upcoming days. I will also cover what other apps are added by Acer, but lets put it another way, of the 16gb, 12gb was free and that was after all the Google apps got updated. That translates into hardly any bloatware. There was only one web browser, Chrome and only one music player and that was Google Play Music.

I have in my other post today attached some photo samples. At the same time as reviewing the Acer Liquid Jade I am also reviewing the Acer Liquid Leap Smartband. Over the next few days I will be covering off the overall phone contents, camera, audio and finally concluding my views.

In the usual format, if you have any questions, please ask.