Acer CloudMobile S500 review: Out of the blue

Introduction

As the industry moves forward, you no longer need to pay top dollar to find a capable smartphone.

While last year you could barely find any dual-core devices in the mid-range, you can now even treat yourself to a pair of Krait cores without breaking the bank.

The Acer CloudMobile S500 official pictures

If getting the most bang for your buck is high on your priority list for the holiday shopping, the Acer CloudMobile S500 is one of the most interesting offering on the market right now. Offering an excellent feature set at a very attractive price point, it promises to deliver extremely solid smartphone experience while saving you some cash in the same time.

But don't just take our word for it - take a look at its key specs yourselves.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
• Tri-band HSPA+
• 4.3" 16M-color IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen of 720 x 1280 pixel resolution (~342 ppi)
• 8 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, 1080p@30fps video recording, HDR, touch focus
• 720p front-facing camera
• Android 4.0.4 Ice Crea, Sandwich
• 1.5GHz dual-core Krait CPU, Adreno 225 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8960A chipset, 1GB of RAM
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, hotspot
• GPS receiver with A-GPS support
• Custom Acer launcher
• Digital compass
• 8GB of inbuilt storage
• Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
• Dolby Mobile audio enhancement
• Built-in accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• microUSB port
• Bluetooth v4.0 with A2DP, file transfers
• Acer cloud service for online storage and syncing
• DivX and XviD support
• Built-in Swype keyboard
• NFC support
• microSD card slot
• FM Radio

Main disadvantages

• No word on Jelly Bean update for now
• Not the most compact smartphone with a 4.3" screen around
• Relatively modest battery life
• All plastic construction
• Sub-par camera performance

720p display, 8 MP snapper and dual-core Krait processor with a gig of RAM – you don’t see many of those in the mid-range, let alone on a single smartphone. The Acer CloudMobile S500 is also willing to throw in a microSD card slot and Dolby Mobile audio enhancements to round up the package.

Sure enough – this one lacks Jelly Bean at this stage, but then again, most of its competitors haven’t gone past Ice Cream Sandwich either. The tiny battery should be posing a bigger concern for potential buyers. The 1460mAh juice pack has lots of pixels to feed and we are curious how it will fare in our battery test.

The Acer CloudMobile S500 at HQ

Still, there’s no such thing as a perfect smartphone, but the Acer CloudMobile S500 ticks so many of the right boxes, that it’s off to an excellent start. Let’s see if the positive impressions stand after the unboxing and hardware inspection. We start right after the jump.