Acer's Event Surprise, the Liquid Jade Smartphone Hands-on

At the end of Acer's event, S.T. Liew, Acer's President of Smartphone Business Group, came out on stage to show off its latest mid-range smartphone, the Liquid Jade. While S.T. didn't announce any specifications other than its 5-inch screen size, he did say that the Liquid Jade was all curves with "no sharp surfaces." As you can see, it's quite an attractive device with a curved Gorilla Glass screen with minimal bezels covering the front.

While we were not able to play with a proper working model (S.T. had the only working one, and he wasn't about to let us poke around and see things we weren't supposed to), we did manage to hold and take pictures of some non-functioning prototypes. Acer was showing the Jade in three different colors at the event -- black, white and light jade, but it may come in additional colors when it launches this summer. We did manage to get one question about its internal specs answered: it's not powered by an Intel SoC. Unfortunately, that's all S.T. could say on that front, so it could have either a Qualcomm, Nvidia, or perhaps even a MediaTek SoC.

The light jade is certainly quite a unique color for a phone, and it's not one that I've seen before.

The Liquid Jade looks great in black, but the finish is super-glossy, so it's sure to be a scratch and fingerprint magnet.

The white model is just as glossy, but its lighter color should mask surface marks better than the black model.

Acer didn't give us any details about the camera, but since this is a lower cost device, it will probably be no more than 13 MP. The Jade has a single LED flash.

There's a speaker on the bottom that has the DTS logo on it, though we weren't told if it is a stereo one.

From the side, the Liquid Jade is fairly slim, but not more so than most current-gen smartphones.

On the left side is a door which covers the SIM slot and probably a microSD slot, given that it would be a pretty big opening for just a SIM slot.

While we couldn't play with the working model, we did manage to get one picture of it, and you can see that the 5-inch screen's bezels are very thin. It also seems to be running a lightly skinned version of stock Android and has on-screen buttons. We weren't able to find out which version of Android was running on it, but it should ship with at least Android 4.4, perhaps even 4.5 if Google releases it at Google IO next month.

The Liquid Jade will be coming this summer to Europe and Asia, the markets where Acer's smartphones are currently sold. We asked S.T. Liew about U.S. availability, but he couldn't say if the Jade was coming to North America, only that they were in talks with partners about the possibility.

Stay tuned to Tom's Hardware for more news about the Liquid Jade. Hopefully, Acer will see fit to release its full specifications and pricing sooner rather than later.

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