Slick new Irish comparison site

One of the problems of being a small country is that the domestic market is small and consequently native commercial internet properties are actually a bit thin on the ground. Imagine life if Amazon or Play didn't serve the Irish market from the UK. This situation is especially true in comparison shopping. While over in the UK we have moneysupermaket.com, gocompare.com, comparethemarket and confused.com to name just a few - comparing financial products and pretty much anything else is quick and easy.

What's the situation in Ireland? Well 123.ie used to offer comparisons but now seems to be pretty much a broker for Travellers Insurance under the hood. Which is a shame - I've used 123.ie a couple of times. UChoose.ie initially launched with a site that was like a bad-parody of early ninety's web pages complete with typos on the homepage. Then the Irish times bought a small stake and at least it got a facelift, but is still sucked and now unfortunately it's being wound up. Compareireland.ie just looks like an fugly directory service leaving all the legwork up to you.

I stumbled onto bonkers.ie. The site has de rigeur "beta" sticker on it and a twitter feed. So far it offers comparisons for financial products and energy. Insurance (household, etc) in the next month or so. The site is pretty impressive - I tried comparing a couple of savings products (a couple years ago it would have been mortgages - but that's the recession for you). It's slick.

2.1 for Acer Liquid

The Acer Liquid e has been announced which is basically the Acer Liquid with an updated OS from Android 1.6 (Donut) to 2.1 (Eclair) and should be out this month. Attempting to call this a new phone by giving it an "e" moniker just leaves everyone confused. The blogs/techfeed react by saying this is the same phone, just with an updated OS. What could have been a positive "Acer updates the Liquid to 2.1 goodness making a great phone even better" gets at best a "huh? Liquid e, eh?". Meanwhile the early adopters that have helped to make the Liquid such a grassroots success are left scratching their heads - does this mean their existing Liquids are getting an update to 2.1 or not? Presumably unless Acer really wants to generate some bad reaction an update will be coming.

HTC by contrast have been very good about letting people knowing where they stand. Pre-announcing ROM updates. They've generated a lot of goodwill from users and remember HTC fluffed the original release of the HTC Hero, the ROM was slow leading to initial reviews claiming the handset was "laggy". They quickly released an updated ROM that fixed the problem and will even support 2.1 on the Hero.

So Acer why so silent, how about some clarity.

Meanwhile if you really can't wait for the Android 2.1 love there's always.....

acer-liquid-community-rom-bugtracker - Project Hosting on Google Code

Acer Liquid selling well

Not launched in US yet, but still selling well.
Acer upped shipments to end March (Q1) from 200K to 250K due to short supply of Acer Liquids.

Acer’s Google Android Phone Sales Beat Expectations (Update1) - BusinessWeek