Band of (Many) Brothers

The Acer Liquid Leap is the first wearable fitness tracker and smartwatch from Acer. It may seem a bit odd coming from a company that normally makes laptops and tablets, but everyone is getting in on this game at the moment.

We got a first-hand look at the watch in action to see how it differs from the masses.

Acer Liquid Leap – Design and Features

The Acer Liquid Leap looks quite a lot like several other fitness trackers. It’s a rubber band with a clasp around the back, and there is a little screen on the front.

It’s a bit like a Samsung Gear Fit merged with a Garmin Vivofit. That’s no bad thing, and the 17mm band thickness means it’s not ridiculously chunky.

The Liquid Leap will come in five colours, and in the demo we saw the black and red versions. To give the design its own bit of visual bite, there’s a little anodised metal inlay, although at present we’re not sure whether this will be plastic or metal in the final version.

What we really need to note here is the screen. It may be small and monochrome, but having a little OLED display means this is a smartwatch rather than just a plain fitness tracker.

It will tell you the time, and hooks up with your phone over Bluetooth to give you notifications of messages and so on. If we are to believe Acer’s spokespeople it’ll also offer pretty good battery life for such a feature-rich device – it’ll last for up to five days off a charge.

There’s no ‘core’ bit to remove and charge with the Liquid Leap either. Instead there are little metal contacts on the underside of the band that hook into a charging dock, which we’re yet to see.

Acer Liquid Leap – What Does it Do?

With any smartwatch, you need to ask what it is actually capable of doing. And at present we’re not sure of the full extent of its powers. I’m not sure whether Acer is even sure what it’ll eventually be able to do.

But the basics are in place. You can track various exercises, and Acer implies there’s some intelligence in this that’ll be able to tell what sort of activity you’re doing – that or you’ll be able to manually specify.

Like other watches of this size, though, there’s no integrated GPS. And unlike the Gear Fit there isn’t a heart rate sensor either. It’s ultimately a fairly rudimentary device that works with your phone best, rather than in isolation. However, it will also track your daily steps in Fitbit fashion – which is all some people want.

First Impressions

A simple design and having a screen to call on make the Acer Liquid Leap one of the more interesting fitness tracker watches. It doesn’t have a single feature or a particularly notable style to really separate it from the masses of products like this out there, though, so its success may largely depend on price.

And that’s something we don’t know yet. Acer plans to release the Liquid Leap in July-August time to limited territories. We’ll look to get a proper look at the watch for its UK release, assuming there is one.

Next, read our best fitness tracker round-up