MWC 2012: Various brands overview

Acer, too made an appearance at the Mobile World Congress this year with two Android smartphones. The company, which is a by-word for cost-effectiveness, stayed in the shadows for the last couple of months, it seems, waiting to show what its been working on.

The Droids in question are the high-end Acer CloudMobile and the more value-oriented Acer Liquid Glow.

Acer CloudMobile

Let's start with the CloudMobile, which continues Acer's design lines from previous phones, especially with the curved top and bottom ends of the device. From the very first touch we were quite impressed with the feel and grip its back cover provides.

The back cover aside, the Acer CloudMobile features a 4.3-inch IPS screen with an HD resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. It's also one of the few Droids out there to sport software Android keys, rather than hardware ones. Overall, the screen isn't the best we've seen, but it definitely ranks as one of the better ones. Colors are bright and sharp, and blacks are deep and saturated.

That's because of Acer's way of putting the display together. They've used a single glass, which has literally zero air between it and the digitizer. This helps reduce reflection and increases the viewing angle.

The CloudMobile is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 8260A chip with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. The microSD card enables you to extend the storage. At the back, the CloudMobile rocks an 8MP camera, which records videos in fullHD.

As we mentioned, the phone runs Android 4.0, but without crazy Acer UI skins on top. Acer has given the vanilla Android some sweet visual extras, like the interesting way to unlock the screen or check a missed call when the phone is locked. The device also operates with an microSIM card.

At the end of the day, the Acer CloudMobile is a very decent high-end Droid on a budget. Unlike its little brother - the Acer Liquid Glow, which we are going to overview now.

Acer Liquid Glow

The Liquid Glow is Acer's first low-end Android phone to run the latest version of Ice Scream Sandwich. It's back, unfortunately, doesn't feature the rubberized back of the CloudMobile we liked, but a plain plastic one instead. That is for a reason, though. Acer will offer the Liquid Glow in black, white and pink.

Hardware-wise, the Liquid Glow doesn't impress, with a quad or a dual-core processor. Instead, it has a single-core 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 and 512MB of RAM. Still, Ice Cream Sandwich feels very snappy, despite the lack of a powerhouse under the hood.

At the front, there's an 3.7-inch WVGA TFT touchscreen and unlike the CloudMobile, the Luiqd Glow has four capacitive touch keys. At the back, there's a 5MP snapper with LED flash, recording 720p videos with ease.

Overall, both the CloudMobile and Liquid Glow are great looking phones with more than decent features for the price Acer will ask. While, we don't have specific information on pricing, don't expect them to break the bank. The Acer CloudMobile will go on sale in Q3 and as for the Liquid Glow, it's time to shine will be around Q2.