Acer Liquid A1 Android Smartphone Ships This Month

Acer have confirmed that their first Android smartphone, the Acer Liquid A1, will arrive in late November, at least in the UK.  According to retailer Clove, the Qualcomm Snapdragon based smartphone – which will run Android 1.6 Donut rather than the newer Android 2.0 OS – is priced at £286 pre-tax ($481).

That gets you a 3.5-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, HSDPA, WiFi b/g and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, together with GPS and a 5-megapixel camera.  Acer have added a few of their own flourishes to the UI – as we learned from a pre-release preview – but nothing to quite the same extent as HTC have managed.

Unfortunately, the main bad news is that Acer have purposefully underclocked the 1GHz Snapdragon processor to 768MHz.  There's also no talk of when (or even if) Acer will push out an Android 2.0 update for the Liquid; we've got a request for clarification in with Acer's PR, and will update when we know more.