A liquid market
Probably the most talked about smartphone to come from Acer to date has been the Liquid (pictured below), which was the first to combine both Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC (system-on-chip) and version 1.6 of Google's Android operating system.
We asked de Lencquesaing why Acer had chosen Snapdragon as the chipset for Liquid. "We have two phones with Snapdragon," he said. "The Liquid is targeted at a higher segment and Snapdragon offers advantages in resolution and PC-like speed."
But there are plenty of other SoC makers that claim to provide similar performance to Snapdragon, like NVIDIA with Tegra and Texas Instruments with its OMAP series. Can we expect to see Acer bringing out handsets in based on other SoCs in future? "We're happy at this time with our relationship with Qualcomm," said de Lencquesaing.
To conclude, we moved to the future and asked how de Lencquesaing sees the smartphone market evolving. "It's just a matter of time until all phones are effectively smartphones," he said. "At relative parity of price, most feature-phone users would switch to smartphones."
And Acer's ambitions within the smartphone market? "This is a strategic investment," said de Lencquesaing. "We want to be in the top five within five years."
