Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus

Editor's Review of the Galaxy Ace Plus

The Ace Plus, as its name suggests, was released as an update to the Galaxy Ace. Its main improvements include an upgraded processor, curvier body, and a greatly improved onboard memory. But are its improvements enough to justify the £200 asking price?

Design & Build

The Ace Plus is slightly curvier than its predecessor, looking like a dinkier version of the Galaxy S3. Of course, this is a flattering comparison as the phone is nearly 3mm thicker than Samsung's flagship phone at 11.2mm.

Despite the screen being 0.15" bigger than that of the original Ace, Samsung went a bit lazy on us by keeping the same 320 x 480 px resolution, giving it a lower ppi (158) than its predecessor.

The quality of the screen is a mixed bag. While it's reasonably bright and colourful, the viewing angles are poor and the resolution definitely won't leave you drooling over your phone in open-mouthed amazement.

The 5MP camera featured here takes snaps with resolutions of up to 2560 x 1920. The quality of the photos is good, with low noise levels and a great depth of colour. The same praise, however, can't be given to video recording, which has a bitrate of 10.1Mbps and records sound in muffled mono quality.

Performance

The Ace Plus features a bigger processor than the original Ace, but don't get too excited as this is a sturdy-but-modest 1GHz Snapdragon S1. That being said, even under heavy strain the processor runs with little slowdown and no bugginess.

The battery on the Ace Plus is as you'd hope for from a relatively low-horsepower phone. Medium usage of the phone should see you get a good 2 days life out of it, with its Talk time on 3G clocking in at up to 7 hours and 20 minutes.

OS & Interface

As with the screen size 'upgrade,' Samsung could've made more effort here by preloading this phone with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich rather than 2.3.6 Gingerbread. It's still a nifty OS though, offering 7 homescreens capable of hosting a wealth of widgets and folders.

Samsung's TouchWiz UI is one of the best out there, and offers plenty of customisability as well as an app launcher that allows you to create folders. Also included are the trademark four shortcuts at the bottom of the screen which can be edited, and a handy lockscreen that points out to you any events you may have missed.

Multimedia and Storage

The audio and video functionality on the Ace Plus do their jobs decently. The video player supports 3GP and MP4, with the glaring omission here being DivX support. It was wishful thinking that it'd handle 720p videos, and it duly fails to do so.

Like the video player, the audio on the Ace Plus is functional rather than flashy. The sound quality is good, but seems to work better through external speakers rather than headphones, which are prone to some minor distortion.

The Ace Plus contains 3GB of internal storage, which isn't bad compared to some budget handsets out there that perplexingly include sub-GB onboard space. Either way, you'll probably want to expand it and that option is available via microSD, which accomodates a 32GB card.

Conclusion

For a budget handset, the Ace Plus isn't all that budgety. That being said, it runs the Android Gingerbread show very smoothly on its 1GHz processor, and Samsung's TouchWiz UI makes it intuitive and easy to use. Its average resolution and sound quality don't make it much of a media centre, but it'll more than satisfy your basic smartphone needs.