Acer has matched the curved back of with a very slight bowing of the front so slight as to be almost unnoticeable. Acer claims that this shaping makes the screen look brighter and crisper, although it's an unconvincing illustion at best.
The screen is capacitive which means it supports pinch to zoom and we found one of the most common uses of this feature, zooming when web browsing, to be a smooth and responsive experience. Web browsing is also enhanced by the fact that Android 2.2 supports Flash but very oddly this is not pre-installed. You have to go to the Android Market and install Adobe Flash Player 10.1 yourself. With that process completed we were able to stream video from web sites such as the BBC News web site, and it played smoothly.
When it comes to entering text, for email or SMS creation for example, you are at the mercy of Acer's on screen keyboard. In tall mode the screen isn't really wide enough for comfortable two-thumb typing, but in wide mode there is a lot more space for the keyboard to spread out, so we found thumb-tapping was easy. The predictive text system worked well too and we've no real complaints about speed of use.
While the Acer Liquid Metal does not particularly aim at either the consumer or business sectors the shake control might suggest leanings towards the former. You can shake the smartphone to silence an alarm or to move forwards and back while listening to music. Neither is a huge plus point, and we found the music controls required a bit too much vigour to be really useful.
