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Knock knock. Who’s there? The interrupting cow. Interrupting cow wh–Moooo! There’s nothing worse than being interrupted, which is why the new Acer Liquid S1 includes features to stop you from being disturbed from what you’re doing.
We don’t know what Samsung thinks of the S-flavoured name — the Samsung Galaxy S4 just hit shops, after all — but we do know Acer’s S-branded device is squarely aimed at taking on the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. The Note was the first inbetween-screen to bridge the gap between phone and tablet — or ‘phablet’, if you must — and at 5.7 inches, the S1 is similarly sized, complete with stylus pokey-pen.
A new feature added to the S1’s Android software is that whatever app you’re in, you can quickly call up other important apps in a ghostly see-through layer on top of what you’re doing. Tap the Float Apps shortcut, and the maps app, calculator, notes app or camera appear in transparent form, without leaving the app you’re in.
The similar Float Caller feature sees a small notification window pop up when someone calls you, so you can take the call or dismiss it without leaving the app you’re in. If you want to let the caller know you’re busy, you can dismiss the call but send a cheery text explaining that you can’t talk because you’re in a meeting or juggling chainsaws, or something.
The Liquid S1 sports a 5.7-inch high-definition screen with 1,280×720-pixels on deck. Under that is a quad-core Mediatek processor and 1GB of RAM, running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean software.
The 8-megapixel camera has a 24mm lens, and you don’t even have to press a button to take a photo: just say “cheese” and the camera automatically fires off a snap. Useful if you want to set your camera down and run in the picture, less so if you’re at the dairy counter in Tesco.
The S1 has 8GB of on-board storage, with a microSD card slot for an extra 32GB of memory. It goes on sale in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Russia for around £300, although exact details are yet to be confirmed.
What do you think of the Acer Liquid S1? Is it a serious rival to the Note 2? Tell me your thoughts in the comments, or check out our uninterrupted Facebook page.
