Smartphones paranoia is still the driving force in the consumer market these days and this year should be tagged as the smartphone year. So recently, the consumer electronics giant or rather more appropriately said the PC manufacturing giant, Acer unveiled a Smartphone. Although, industry analysts and Smartphone experts have always commented that Acer does not always get the Smartphone thing right but analysts have tagged this latest Smartphone by Acer, known as Stream, an out of the box product. It has a very eye catching physical design and is also equipped with some nice and cool piece of hardware.

On the specifications end, the phone is fully equipped and has all the reasonable features that a customer either longs for in a Smartphone or those are available with the famous platforms including the likes of Apple and Google powered Android phones.

One of the remarkable things about this Acer’s Smartphone is that the company has taken a very unusual approach towards the skinning of the user interface. The company has no recent history of skinning the Smartphones they have introduced and whenever they have done previously on skinning, the results were always dreadful. But this time, Acer Stream has good looks and feels to it. Though, it is a little convoluted but the overall working of the system is pretty fine.

Widgets and the Home Screen

Well to start off, there is a Home Screen that clearly shows some information about widgets. Out of the application box, there is a Weather Widget that has some cool appealing to it. The users can get almost four different kinds of Homescreens with the swipe of their finger having different widgets on the top. To change any used widget, the user just needs to tap on change the widget button and a considerable cache of widgets will pop up to choose from.

Swiping on a tab on the bottom of the screen unlocks one more attached screen with the application shortcuts displayed on it. If you press the Home Screen touch button that is beneath the displayed application screen, the widget menu pops up.

Overall the skinning effort by Acer is pretty good with some visually rich menus in the media gallery and a very eye catching history screen that shows where the users have been recently as far as visiting the applications is considered. I like the cover flow style of thumbnails view and from my side its thumbs up.

Camera

The Acer Stream is equipped with a 5 Megapixel camera. As far as the options with the cameras are considered, it’s pretty low in it. There are no flash and integral settings for camera and feature wise it is very basic. However, one good thing is the Macro Mode. Well, the shooting mode or the video capture mode is good and it has a 720p video shooting option.

Ports

The Acer’s Stream is equipped with a HDMI port and has a cable that comes with it, so the users can send videos, photos, or any other contents to a larger monitor or to a TV as a matter of fact. And if the user is sending a video then the 3 hardware buttons on the front chassis of the phone can enable the further control of the video. These 3 buttons at the phone front metallic body are part of the design and give a pretty attractive look.

Overall the handset is light and thin and gives a superb feel in the hands; the display screen is AMOLED powered and is of 3.7 inches with a nice display ratio of 800×480. The screen is capacitive and eases the multi-touch as well.

Virtual keypad

The web browsing experience on the set is pretty good and the pinch to zoom feature is also very interactive, and the WebPages give an easy flowing interface. The keyboard has special keys in the browser for ‘www’ and the ‘.com’. But on the downside, there is no specific ‘Space Bar’. Moreover, there is no Flash support in the browser for the websites ( it’s hard to imagine that why these Smartphone companies not concentrating on the inclusion of Flash support on their browsers and their integral applications).

Processor

Acer Stream is equipped with a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor, a Wi-Fi and GPS features are present as well. The set is also equipped with a FM Radio and the recording option; Acer’s media player nemoPlayer enables the fusion of all the media present on the phone together. The phone also has a Dolby Mobile Equalizer set that offers a different set of options for both the video and the audio files. This makes the set a good multimedia package.

The set has a total of 2GB of flash memory and the package contains an 8GB MicroSD card as well (that’s a good Add-on). On the battery side, Acer is claiming that they have improved their battery technology but with these entire options available for the set, it is hard to neglect this fact that the users will have to give frequent charges to the phone. As far as the previous history is considered, Acer has not been able to get the things right but Stream surely looks as a good edition to Acer’s Smartphone family. The Acer Stream has a price tag of 399 pounds with a SIM-free package. The Price sounds nice with all the features that Acer is offering in the handset. In the design category, I will rate it 9/10 and for the price tag category, it will be 8/10.