Samsung Galaxy Ace is a stylish trim smartphone with a chic minimal design and packed with features.
Form & Function
The Galaxy Ace comes with a 3.5 inch HVGA capacitive screen with full touch capability with 320x480 pixel resolution. It's an TFT-LCD type screen, nevertheless looks sharp, bright and vivid. It has a good response to touch. But this model's screen does not sport the super tough Gorilla Glass as found in the Motorola Defy. The front has a glossy finish and the textured back cover has good grip, sandwiched on a strong plastic chassis. It has a smooth, solid feel. The Ace has a auto-focus 5MP camera with LED photo light mounted at the back. Take good photographs and take QVGA video at 15fps. There's an Android media player of course. It also supports memory cards up to 32GB. It has 150MB of on-board memory with a 2GB inbox. There's also an FM radio RDS. On the top edge is the microUSB charging socket with cover and the 3.8mm jack. The power button on the right is also the screen lock. In hand it measures 112.4 x 59.9 x 11.5mm, weighs 133g and feels comfortable. The battery is a standard Li-ion 1350MAh which claims up to 660min on 2G and 390min on 3G. Standby is 640hr on 2G and 420hr on 3G.
Features & Apps
The Ace runs on the Google Android 2.2 Froyo with great features, with the Samsung overlay of Touchwiz 3.0. It supports the fantastic Android browser and even supports Flash. It has got 7.2Mbps HSDPA for quick downloads on 3G, supports the 802.11 WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 and USB 2.0 connectivity. It runs on a 800MHz processor. A strong competitor is the powerful Motorola Atrix which also runs on the Froyo but has a1GB dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 (Core2 Duo) processor.
The phone easily downloads innumerable apps and games from the Android Market. A lot of the best stuff come free, for work as well as fun. Samsung has kept the Android's default settings and has sorted out the bugs learnt form the Galaxy S. You can pinch to zoom. The Ace comes with preloaded apps and widgets. Use ThinkFree to view or edit and create MS Word, Excel or Powerpoint files. It can run Angry Birds too. It has an Integrated Social Hub, pre-installed Google Maps and built-in GPS. Customise and view your contacts in four separate formats- Media, Activity, History and Info. Phone-book, IM, e-mail and SNS can be integrated into one page. The Swype keyboard, Quicktype, speeds up typing by your swiping gesture on the letters. You can switch to normal on-screen keyboard too. But this may not equal the ease of the QWERTY keypad as found on the BlackBerry Torch 9800.
