Acer Liquid S2 packs 4K video—in a smartphone!

 

 

For all the press that 4K TVs are getting right now, 4K video recording hasn't really hit the point-and-shoot camera market yet. But it seems that Acer has decided to leapfrog the competition, and start offering it in smartphones before it even gets to compact cameras, with the newly announced Liquid S2.

The Liquid S2 has only been announced in Europe, and we don't know if/when it'll be headed to these shores, but it's an impressive sounding device. It packs a 6-inch, 368 ppi, IPS screen; a 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, and 2GB of RAM. For the photography and video side of the camera, Acer appears to have pulled out all the stops. The rear camera has a 13-megapixel sensor, can capture 4K video, has an LED ring flash, and a f/2.2, 28mm lens. The front facing camera can shoot 2-megapixel stills, 1080p video, and has a 88° wide angle field of view.

Shooting 4K video, you're going to need an awful lot of storage space, and the Liquid S2 can be boosted up to 128GB using MicroSDXC cards.

We're guessing the Liquid S2 probably doesn't have a particularly big sensor (it's not officially stated anywhere), so the image quality probably won't be astonishingly good. But it does seem that photography has become one of the major battle grounds of selling smartphones. From Nokia's Lumia line of high-resolution smartphones, to Android's photospheres, and the iPhone still being the most popular camera on Flickr, the camera is as much a selling point of a smartphone as anything else. And with 4K shaping up to be the new battleground, it looks like you might be able to get ultra-high-definition video on your phone before your dedicated digital camera.