Specifications and hardware
It’s easy to see why the Acer Liquid Z5 is so cheap when you start to use it. The performance really isn’t spectacular. Inside you have a 1.3Ghz Cortex A7 processor with two cores. Compare this to something like the Nexus 5 (without doubt the finest phone ever!) which has a 2.3Ghz quad core processor and even on paper you can tell that it’s not going to be winning any speed races. Processor power should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s not about how fast a phone is, it’s about context. If you are selling a phone to a young-adult market as a gaming device, power is everything. If you are selling something to an elderly market then processor power becomes less important and the focus is on ease of use. In this case, with a low DPI and a low budget, the Liquid Z5 isn’t aiming at winning awards. It’s looking to provide value for money and it does that well. Day to day surfing the web is fine and, yes, you might have to wait a few seconds for tabs and apps to load, but it gets there eventually.
The cameras are noticeably basic with the front facing one being of VGA resolution which equates to less than 1MP. The rear facing camera isn’t as bad, rolling in with a reasonable 5 mega pixels. The quality is also reasonable but it suffers in lower light levels and the screen doesn’t really do the photos justice.
Given the little play/pause button on the back of the phone I’d hoped that perhaps sound was going to be a focal point of this phone. It isn’t. Looking at the phone it’s easy to think that it has dual front facing speakers like the HTC One, but you would be wrong. Only one of the grills hides a speaker and the other, I’m guessing, hides the microphone. The audio itself is reasonable enough, albeit a bit tinny, and you’d certainly want to pick yourself up a bluetooth speaker if you wanted to listen to tunes. On that note, the phone comes with DTS sound ‘enhancement’. I have to say that to me all this does is make the sound louder. Turning off DTS just makes the maximum volume level really quiet.
| Internals | |
|---|---|
| CPU | Dual-core 1.3 GHz Cortex-A7 |
| GPU | Mali-400 |
| OS | Android OS, v4.2 |
| Cameras | |
| Rear facing camera | 5 MP, 2592 х 1944 pixels, LED flash#003 |
| Front facing camera | <1MP (VGA) |
| Display | |
| Size | 5.0 inches (196 ppi pixel density) |
| Resolution | 480 x 854 pixels |
| Type | TFT Multitouch |
| Memory | |
| Amount | 512MB Ram, 4GB User |
| Upgradeable | MicroSD card slot up to 32GB |
| Sound | |
| Speaker | Single front facing |
| Headphone jack | 3.5mm |
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