Acer revisits Liquid with the Tang soup-proof smartphone

Acer hasn’t had much in the way of locally released smartphones for a while now, but the company is revisiting the chunky Liquid phone for something that is highly resistant to dinner.

Designed to survive a chance encounter with your dinner, the Acer Liquid Tang is the company’s first product designed to tackle the problem of phones broken from being dropped in food, specifically soup.

Based in one of Acer’s older designs, but running modern innards, the Liquid Tang is a revamped answer to the queries of customers said Acer in a press release this week.

“Many customers have asked for a phone that is more resistant to their food,” said a spokesperson for Acer, pointing to the Tang and saying that laksa and other soups had become one of the primary ways its customers had destroyed their phones.

The new edition of the Liquid includes heat and humidity resistant plastics, with hydrophobic-treated glass and silicone, which is primarily a technology designed to ward off water, but should work with soups and just about any other liquid.

We’re told it’s IP69 certified, which is a new standard for us, and technically encompasses the typical high-end water and dust resistance devices like the Sony Xperia Z1 and Samsung Galaxy S5 have received, though we’re told the “9” means “hot flavoured and stained liquids” as opposed to just merely water alone.

Behind these materials, it’s not as high end a product as what you might see on other phones, but Acer plans to make customers happy all the same, with a quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex A7 processor, 1GB RAM, 8GB storage with support for a microSD slot, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 4G, with all of this sitting under a 3.5 inch 800×480 screen.

Aside for the reinforced casing, Acer has also included some neat features designed to make it more intriguing for people who love their food, such as a thermometer at the bottom of the handset that works with an Acer homescreen widget called “Happy Tongue” to tell you when your soup is cool enough to eat without burning yourself.

We’re told a social network is being developed for Liquid Tang owners called “Noodle,” which the company hopes to connect Instagram-like food pictures with short food reviews across a GPS, but it won’t be ready until the Tang’s release in the next few months.

The Tang joins Acer’s other announcements, which last week included new Liquid models running the Snapdragon processors and offering a screen close to 6 inches (5.98) with Full HD resolution.

It’s unknown yet if any of the new handsets will be coming to Australia, but given how Acer hasn’t released a smartphone locally for a number of years now, we’d be willing to say it probably won’t make landfall anytime soon.

That said, it shouldn’t be long until customers in Taiwan and China get to test their soup with the Tang, as its expected to join the other Acer Liquid models for release in June.

UPDATE (April 2): April Fools! From a technical point of view, this thing is possible, but unlikely given how gross it would make the phone look, feel, and even smell. For the record, though, we did have to kill a phone in order to make this joke, so, rest in piece old Acer Liquid handset.