The Acer Liquid as well as its second coming, the Acer Liquid E, are part of a very dynamic family given the firmware upgrades they receive. But for the users, the amount of ROMs available online (some leaked before actual release) are definitely a good thing, meaning we (the Acer Liquid users) have a wide variety of choices regarding to what Android flavor we can run on our smartphone.

The lasted Android goodie is the Acer Liquid 0.010.00 EMEA GEN1 (as well as its AAP counterpart), which upgrades the Android OS to 2.1-update1 and to the 2.6.29 kernel version. The benefits of upgrading your Android are numerous and being able to run the latest applications is just the tip of the iceberg.

I would like to note that when dealing with the Acer Liquid family, you can flash your ROM regardless of the previous version (just make sure you download the full ROM *.bin file, not an upgrade – in which case there will obviously be requirements). For example, I flashed my 1.001.05-AAP-CSL (Android 1.6) first to 0.008.06 AAP (Android 2.1) and today I switched world zones, going to 0.010.00 EMEA (Android 2.1-update1).

I tried a couple of other combinations and I can say for certain that as long as your device ISN’T ROOTED (!! – if your device is rooted, in 65% of the cases flashing between AAP and EMEA as well as between various ROM versions will fail!). If your device isn’t rooted and you’re thinking about switching to 0.010.00, here are a few quick observations:

  • The new word completion/suggestions system is below abysmal!!! (for some reason it gives priority to names over common words – among the suggestions when I wanted to type “in”, it favored “Ion”, a Romanian common name, which is weird first because there’s no Romanian language for Acer Liquid, I have no Romanian add-on and secondly, I have no “Ion” in my word list, contacts or elsewhere)
  • the main application menu looks nicer, but it’s slower
  • battery life seems slightly improved (this might’ve been since the previous ROM though)

If you’re interested, here’s the firmware download link. However, from experience I would suggest you to use dr Evil’s customized firmware based on 0.008.06.bin (you will need the original bin before installing dr Evil’s mod, which gets rid of many nuisances such as uFooz).