Samsung have laid their cards on the table with the mid-range Ace smartphone. After an extensive hands-on, we let you know whether you should stick or fold.
By Rob Gleeson of Smartphone Republic
Have Samsung delivered a trump card with the Ace? There are more and more affordable smartphones coming onto the market in recent times and many have wondered if the quality will suffer as a result? This time we think Samsung have a full house, Ace high.
While the likes of HTC and Apple are steaming ahead in the smart phone market, Samsung are not ones that take kindly to be being left behind. The Samsung Galaxy S did a lot to prove that they are well able to keep up to date with the big boys and even the Europa proved that there is a gap in the market for quality mid-range smartphones; something that Samsung are about to take a serious strangle hold of.
First off, the Ace isn’t a cheap imitation of a smart phone. It’s running Android 2.2 and performs exceptionally well, capable of doing most things a high-end smartphone can do.
Granted, it’s not going to be able to perform as fast, but if you’re looking for a mid-range handset you can’t exactly expect superhero-like qualities.
The Ace is light too – really light. Weighing just 113g, I actually though the battery wasn’t in the phone at all. It looks sleek and feels good; but I’m not enamoured with the strange material used for the back of the phone. It’s like a bobble dashboard you’ll find in cars and that same style is expected for future instalments of Samsung phones, most noticeably the Nexus S.
Sleek and cheap – what’s not to like?
Elsewhere, the Ace has a respectable 3.4 inch capacitive touch screen with an accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate and impressive multi-tough input method. The screen can become a little cramped at times but for me it’s not a big issue and because the screen is capacitive, multi-touch gestures like pinch to zoom come in very handy.
On the physical side of things, there are very few actual buttons on the phone itself. There is a volume rocker on the left, power/lock button on the right along with a touch sensitive “back” and “search” button either side of a “home” button just below the screen.
Picture-wise, the Ace has a 5-mega-pixel auto focus camera with an LED flash that takes pretty decent quality snaps. My only problem with the camera is that if you want to take 5-mega-pixel quality pictures, you can’t actually use the zoom feature. If you do want to use the zoom, you must decrease the quality of the picture to 2-mega-pixel, which will obviously decrease the quality.
As with any Android smartphone, you can customise any of the seven available homescreens. From Twitter to Facebook, you have all your social networks available with a swipe of your finger. Changing the individual home screens wallpapers is pretty easy too and swiping from screen to screen is fast and efficient.
There are, as always, bundles of apps available to choose from. Advanced Task Killer is one that I would highly recommend for any smart phone user as it increases battery life by between 10 – 15%.
BATTERY: Up to 640 hours on standby and up to 11 hours talk time – not too shabby.
CONNECTIVITY: Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS all standard on the Ace.
MEDIA: 5 mega-pixel camera supported by a LED flash takes nice snaps. Video recording is also available but isn’t the best quality.
STORAGE: 150mb internal phone storage with a 2gb micro SD card included. The Ace can handle an SD card of up to 32gb too.
PROCESSOR: 800 MHz ARM 11 processor ensures the phone will perform fast enough for a mid-range smartphone but don’t expect to be blown away.
OPERATING SYSTEM: Running Android 2.2, the Ace can run everything that any high-end smartphone can – it’ll just be a little slower.
All in all, the Samsung Galaxy Ace is a qualitysmartphone. It has all the features that are available on most high-end devices and is easy enough on the pocket; and this is the area Samsung are going to exploit. If they can continue to produce quality medium and high end devices, Samsung will have a real advantage on its competitors. Two thumbs up from me.
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