Build Quality and Design
The first thing you would think when you pick up the Ace is how light it is. The plastic construction and thin back cover weigh much less than the equivalent metal counterpart. Design wise the Galaxy Ace is one of the best looking budget Android phones out there. The front of the device is covered by a flush clean glass interrupted by only the speaker grille and the single home button while the top and bottom bezel are the same size, lending it an iPhone like appearance. The back of the device is also very well done with a matte textured finish which feels nice to the touch and provides ample grip while the shiny trim provides a feeling of rigidity to the device. Unfortunately, like the Galaxy S 2, the back cover of the Galaxy Ace is worryingly flimsy and provides almost no strength to the phone whatsoever.
It’s just about as flimsy as it looks
Display
It’s a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, but don’t be mistaken; no SAMOLED+ display to be found here. To bring costs down, the Samsung Galaxy Ace uses a bog standard TN LCD panel with mediocre colour saturation and average contrast ratios. Resolution is also a weak point of the Galaxy Ace’s display with individual pixels easily discernible, but then again it’s hard to complain for a budget smartphone. It’s no iPhone 4, but thankfully it’s not as bad as the original HTC Wildfire. Resolution and display aspect ratio should be fully compatible with most Market Apps.
There’s no fooling your retina here…
Technically, the Galaxy Ace handles colours well although Samsung have tweaked its colour reproduction to appear more AMOLED. Colour gradients show clear signs of over saturation and preference for blue colours. Fortunately greyscale gradients are clean showing no signs of banding or unsightly colour tints. I couldn’t run the black level tests to try and discern dark shades of black. It appears that Android or Samsung tweaks the colours slightly to prefer colour vibrancy over faithful reproduction. This is all fine on a phone anyway; I assume most people would prefer vivid colours over “duller” accurate colour reproduction.
Reasonable colour reproduction
Very high black levels (even on low brightness)
The TN display handles greyscale nicely without any unwanted hues
The Galaxy Ace’s use of a TN LCD is especially obvious when it comes to reproducing black. Black levels are very high (almost as high as the iPhone 3GS) and combined with the limited viewing angle creates an unfavourable night time viewing experience. In bright daylight though, the relatively high black level should be drowned out by the displays reflectance anyway. Not that you would want to view the display in bright daylight however; at peak brightness it managed well under indoor lighting but even on cloudy days the display is difficult to read.
Camera
What do you expect. A £120 phone with a 5MP camera and LED flash. Pictures are adequate with nice accurate colours. Even at the highest settings, compression artefacts are clearly visible and in bright conditions the images tend to appear washed out with details in bright areas blown out. It’s not circa 2001 phone camera, but don’t expect it to replace your point and shoot.
Video performance is also quite poor. The Galaxy Ace struggles to maintain a steady frame rate, even when recording at 640×480 (the highest resolution available).
Unlike the Galaxy S 2, the Galaxy Ace does not have a front facing camera as you might think. The two round things you see to the right of the speaker grille are the proximity and light sensor.
Android and Performance
Being a budget smartphone, we can forgive the Samsung Galaxy Ace’s use of a first generation Snapdragon SoC. All would be fine if Samsung had clocked this at 1GHz (like the original Nexus One) which produces reasonable performance. The MSM7227 chipset Sammy uses in the Galaxy Ace is clocked only at 800MHz to add insult to a already slow first generation processor architecture. The UI occasionally struggles to produce decent frame rates while scrolling and running several applications at the same time results in a very sluggish experience. I blame this on the slow SoC, but also the lack of Android’s utilisation of the GPU for the UI. The almost decent Adreno 200 GPU in this phone stays mostly dormant while the already underpowered CPU struggles with relatively basic UI tasks. It’s not ideal, but it’s the same situation for most Android devices.
Unlike it’s higher end brother; the Galaxy S 2, the Ace doesn’t support flash most likely due to it’s sub par processor and as a result we miss out on Neave’s mind-blowing flash visuals. Not that you would want to run flash anyway; browsing without Flash is already choppy and while I have no complaints on the speed at which web pages load (over decent WiFi and 3G), navigating can be a real pain after prolonged usage.
Ow.
Possibly the biggest advantage of Android compared to iOS or WP7 is removable storage. The Galaxy Ace offers you the choice of having over 32GB on your phone, or less depending on your budget. Transferring music and videos from your computer is simply a drag and drop affair without any syncing complications frequently seen with iTunes or Zune.
Technically, the Ace should be upgradeable to Android 2.3, but of course this is dependant on carrier optimisations. My review sample came with Android 2.2 Froyo.
Battery Life
Samsung crams a surprisingly large 5Whr battery in this phone which easily gets through a days worth of heavy use. Like almost every other smartphone on the market though, you should ideally charge it every night to guarantee a full days use.
Satisfyingly large battery which delivers satisfying battery life
Conclusion
Being a naturally critical person, I can’t help but fault the Galaxy Ace for all it’s shortcomings, but this is me comparing it to the latest and greatest; something which the Galaxy Ace isn’t trying to achieve. No it doesn’t have NFC, a front facing camera or high end display tech but for the £120 asking price; you get a device which can make calls, browse the internet, listen to music, watch videos and download third party apps. Just to think that it was only a few years ago when such a device would have costed considerably more. While it is unlikely that you’ll enjoy using the Galaxy Ace as much as something like the iPhone or Galaxy S 2, functionally you won’t be losing out on much thanks to the flexible Android OS it runs. For it’s £120 asking price, there are plenty of alternative ways you could go wrong with a budget Android phone.
More Pictures…
Posted on October 22, 2011
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