| Pros | Cons |
| + Innovative interface | - Low power |
| + Very cheap | - Bland design |
| + Decent camera | - Below average battery |
"The Acer Go is cheap and basic but some surprising software features help it stand out".
The Acer Go is all about the basics, giving you the core smartphone functions for a sliver under £50. Everything else is secondary, but that doesn’t mean it can’t deliver in a number of ways, as it actually has a surprisingly solid camera and some innovative features.
On the other hand the specs aren’t great in general and there’s a lot of competition in the entry-level market, so can the Acer Go compete?
The Acer Go looks like any other cheap smartphone in many ways, with a very plain, slightly bland finish. It’s made of a black plastic, but it does at least have a slightly textured almost fabric-like look on the back, with a more metallic sheen on the edges and buttons.
The bezels are on the large side, which is another unfortunate thing which tends to come with low end phones, but on the whole it’s plain rather than ugly.
With a 4.0-inch WVGA screen the Acer Go is one of the more compact phones around. If you actively want a small phone that could be a good thing, but larger screen sizes tend to be more popular these days and it does make the handset a bit cramped for watching videos and web browsing.
But Apple was still using 4.0-inch screens with the iPhone 5S and that was certainly popular enough, so it’s perfectly useable. The exact resolution hasn’t been revealed, but being WVGA it will be around 480 x 800. That’s on the low end, but again it’s a small screen so it doesn’t need a super high resolution.
In practice it doesn’t feel too lacking in clarity though. It’s certainly far from as sharp as a flagship phone, but it’s still perfectly useable.
Sadly the Acer Go is a little lacking for power, with just a 1.2GHz dual-core processor. Most low end handsets have quad-core processors at this point so that’s a bit of a disappointment. Even the similarly priced EE Rook for example does, but the Acer Go at least has a respectable clock speed for an entry level phone.
Android has also got increasingly good at running on low end hardware over the years, so with Android Lollipop on board the experience is far from horrible, but don’t mistake this for anything more than a basic phone. It might have many of the smartphone bells and whistles, but it’s a better fit for someone looking for a feature phone, which they’ll mostly use to talk and text.
The Acer Go has a 5 megapixel camera on the back with an LED flash and an 89-degree wide-angle lens, along with a 2 megapixel snapper on the front.
That’s nothing amazing but it is better than we’d have expected from what is one of the cheapest smartphones available. Many handsets up to around the £150 price range have similar setups, so when it comes to camera the Acer Go is punching above its weight.
The Acer Go runs Android Lollipop so it’s not on outdated software. The actual Acer interface on the phone is also designed to suit all users with a Standard mode giving you the full power of Android, an Easy mode presenting you with larger icons, which could be handy for the visually impaired and a Basic mode which simplifies things for those new to smartphones.
There are two other features worth highlighting too. There’s its Float User Interface, which allows you to have multiple windows open at once and easily switch between apps for true multitasking. There’s a sense that it would feel more at home on a larger screen but it’s still a useful feature and a surprising one for such an affordable phone.
The other notable feature is Build Your Own Cloud (or BYOC), which allows you to sync multiple devices wirelessly and simultaneously and access files such as photos or music that’s stored on other devices. There are apps available which do similar things but it’s a nice feature to have built in and again, a surprising one for such a cheap handset.
Sadly the Acer Go doesn’t have great battery life. Its 1300 mAh juice pack only lasts for up to 300 hours of standby time or 250 minutes of talk time, which means that if you like to use your phone a lot for apps and media the Acer Go will struggle to get through a day, but if you mostly just use it for texting and calling you should be fine.
There’s only 8GB of built in storage but that’s not surprising on low end handsets and there is also a microSD card slot, so you can top it up with up to 32GB more.
The Acer Go is in many ways one of the most basic smartphones around. There’s no 4G, just a dual-core processor and a small screen, but with one of the lowest prices around that’s okay. What’s less forgivable is the below average battery life, but on the flip side it does have some surprisingly useful and innovative software features and a better camera than we’d have expected for the price.
It’s possibly not the perfect balance of price and performance, but if you want a basic smartphone and don’t want to pay a lot for it then the Acer Go will more than do the job, just make sure you carry a charger with you.
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Dimensions : 125 x 64mm Weight: TBC Screen size: 4.0” (WVGA) Screen Resolution: WVGA display resolution Pixels Per Inch (PPI) : TBC Processor: Dual-core application processor RAM: TBC On-board Memory: 8GB (microSD card support) Camera: 5MP (rear) 2MP (front-facing) Operating system: Android Lollipop 3G / 4G LTE: Yes / No Bluetooth / NFC : Yes / No Battery capacity: 1300mAh Colours: Black Price: £49.99 |
