Introduction
With the Galaxy S III busy grabbing the headlines, a midrange smartphone has been making its way to a number of markets without much fanfare. But you can bet the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 won't settle for the role of just another sequel. It has a chance to prove the Galaxy S III is not the only superhot smartphone Samsung has released this season.
And it's going to use it. Aiming to deliver 90% of the benefits of its extremely popular sibling for a fraction of the price, the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 plays to the company's strengths and might turn out to be one of the unsung heroes of the year.
Dual-core might not be top-dog material in the Android realm any more, but it's enough to run virtually all apps and give you a nice smooth sailing around the interface. The entrance of ST-Ericsson in the smartphone race has enabled Android OEMs to make sub-€250 smartphones, with specs that would be considered high-end on any other platform. Now who would say no to a bargain like that?
Key features
Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support
3G with 14.4 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
3.8" 16M-color capacitive LED-backlit LCD touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480 x 800 pixels), Scratch-resistant glass
Android OS v2.3.7 Gingerbread, planned Android 4.0 ICS update
Dual-core 800 MHz Cortex-A9 CPU, 768MB RAM, Mali-400 GPU, NovaThor U8500 chipset
5 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geotagging, Multi Angle shot
720p video recording @ 30fps with continuous autofocus and stereo sound
VGA front-facing camera
Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS
NFC connectivity
4GB built-in storage expandable through the microSD card slot
microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo FM radio with RDS
Voice dialing
Adobe Flash 11 support
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
Main disadvantages
No Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box
All plastic construction
NovaThor U8500 is the least powerful of the dual-core offerings on the market
No screen and capacitive key haptics
The recent crop of inexpensive but reasonably powered droids also answers another criticism Android has been facing lately - that it fails to offer performance in a compact package. Sony was first to up the ante with the Xperia U and now Samsung is ready to rise to the challenge.
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 at ours
The Koreans have stepped up the pricing of their smartphone a bit, but they are willing to throw in a larger screen and expandable storage, so it's going to be a pretty tough pick between those two. Let's waste no more time then and get down to testing - the answers should be coming as the review unfolds.
Display
Speaking of the screen, it's a very good unit and a major improvement over what the Galaxy Ace had. It's a PLS LCD unit with a 3.8" diagonal. The resolution has been more than doubled and is now WVGA (480 x 800) at 246ppi pixel density.
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 has a great screen for the class
The image looks sharp, with reasonably good viewing angles and pleasant colors. The brightness could've been better though and the screen is rather reflective, meaning sunlight legibility is less than stellar.
We put the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 through our usual display tests and we are now giving you its results.
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Display test
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50% brightness
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100% brightness
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Black, cd/m2
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White, cd/m2
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Contrast ratio
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Black, cd/m2
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White, cd/m2
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Contrast ratio
|
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Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160
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0.24
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225
|
921
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0.59
|
500
|
843
|
|
HTC Desire C
|
0.23
|
186
|
814
|
0.5
|
360
|
723
|
|
HTC One X
|
0.15
|
200
|
1375
|
0.39
|
550
|
1410
|
|
Sony Xperia U
|
0.35
|
287
|
831
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0.55
|
515
|
930
|
|
Samsung S7500 Galaxy Ace Plus
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0.27
|
239
|
873
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0.6
|
528
|
888
|
|
Samsung Galaxy Pocket
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0.31
|
238
|
774
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0.62
|
468
|
753
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Gingerbread with TouchWiz UX up front
The Galaxy Ace 2 is running Gingerbread 2.3.6 and Samsung's custom TouchWiz 4.0 launcher. It's not ICS (let alone Jelly Bean), but Samsung's customizations make using Gingerbread a smoother experience than the stock UI.
The lockscreen of the Ace 2 has the usual integration of missed events but doesn't go any further. It's the "drag your finger outside of the circle" type of lockscreen but no shortcuts like in the Galaxy S III. You do get music player controls though.
The standard Samsung lockscreen
The homescreen accommodates plenty of widgets with lots of functionality. You can have up to 7 homescreen panes. A pinch zoom brings you to an aggregate view of all homescreen panes, which can be rearranged, deleted or added.
Homescreen • Thumbed preview
In typical TouchWiz fashion, there are four shortcuts docked at the bottom of the screen that are visible both on the homescreen and in the app drawer. The first three are user configurable (Phone, Contacts, Messaging), the fourth one being locked. It's the app drawer/home shortcut so it makes sense to always keep it in the same place.
Adding widgets, shortcuts, folders or changing wallpapers is done by a context menu that pops up on demand at the bottom of the screen. The list of available widgets can be swipe-scrolled, enjoying a smooth animation throughout. You can also swipe each of the homescreen panes, which is a nice bonus of TouchWiz 4.0.
Adding elements to the homescreen
The app drawer is very similar to the homescreen - you can create folders and pages by dragging them to the appropriate icon at the bottom of the screen. You can also rearrange pages from the same aggregate view as the homescreen.
List view can be enabled in the app drawer instead of the regular grid view. There's also a preview of all your app drawer screens for quicker browsing.
The app drawer
The notification area has toggles that give you easy access from anywhere in the interface to the following functions: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, silent mode and screen auto-rotation.
With the Galaxy Ace 2 you get a standard Android task switcher with the traditional Samsung modification - it has a button to launch a task manager.
The custom task manager offers a lot of functionality. It also comes with a handy widget, which shows you the number of active applications right on your homescreen.
Notifications area • Task manager
Most of the time, Android does really well when it comes to managing apps by itself (in fact, some claim that using a task manager is detrimental to the performance of a phone), so you would only need the task manager to occasionally kill a buggy app.
Synthetic benchmarks
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 is powered by a NovaThor U8500 chipset with a dual-core processor, though clocked lower than the 1GHz minimum we're used to seeing. With 768MB of RAM and Mali-400 GPU, the overall performance should be pretty good though.
Social phonebook
The phonebook has a wide range of features and practically unlimited storage capacity.
There are options to filter contacts that have phone numbers, show/hide some of the groups you've created (including groups from social networks) and change the sorting (by first or last name).
The Galaxy Ace 2 phonebook
The phonebook has the Quick contacts feature, which lets you tap the contact photo for a popup menu with shortcuts to call, text, or email. The TouchWiz-specific swiping gesture is here too - swipe a contact right to make a call and left to compose a message.
Quick contacts • Swiping is a neat gesture for calling and texting
There are many info fields that you can assign to each contact, but it still remains perfectly organized. You have all types listed (numbers, email addresses, etc) and there's a plus sign on the right to add another item of that type. Pressing the minus sign under it deletes the redundant field.
Editing a contact's details
Of course, the real flexibility of the phonebook becomes apparent when you sign into your Facebook or LinkedIn account. After syncing, the phonebook will automatically merge your contacts (you can do it manually too).
The contact info screen is tabbed. The first two tabs are pretty standard - one displays the person's contact information, while the other stores call and message history. The third and fourth tabs handle the social stuff - status updates and the contact's online galleries.
Viewing a contact's details
Weirdly, only Facebook and LinkedIn contacts can be synced with the phonebook - we usually see Twitter contacts in here too.
Smart dialing and video calling
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 had no issues with reception even in areas with poor coverage. Sound in the earpiece was crisp and fairly loud.
The dialer and call log have been integrated into the phonebook, each in its own tab. Smart Dial is enabled for both names and numbers.
Only one contact (with photo) is shown at a time in the Smart Dial suggestions. You can tap the down arrow to view the rest (a digit above the arrow indicates how many contacts have matched your query).
Smart dial is nice
The dialer also has a key for making a video call and another for sending a message instead.
Thanks to the proximity sensor, your screen will automatically turn off during a call. The available options during a call include taking a note, using the keypad, muting or holding the call, or adding another call to the conversation. There's turn-to-mute too, thanks to the accelerometer.
The Call log is the tab next to the dial pad. It displays all the dialed, received and missed calls in one list, while sorting your call history by contacts.
Call history
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 scored Average in our traditional loudspeaker test. The vibration on the other hand is strong, which will alert you in case you don't hear the ringer in a loud environment. Here's how it stacks up against the competition.
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Speakerphone test
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Voice, dB
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Pink noise/ Music, dB
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Ringing phone, dB
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Overal score
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Nokia Lumia 800
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60.9
|
59.0
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61.7
|
Below Average
|
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Samsung Galaxy Nexus
|
66.2
|
60.5
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69.0
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Below Average
|
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Apple iPhone 4S
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65.8
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64.5
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74.6
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Average
|
|
HTC Desire C
|
64.9
|
64.6
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72.2
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Average
|
|
Sony Xperia S
|
72.7
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61.8
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69.6
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Average
|
|
HTC One S
|
65.1
|
64.6
|
76.7
|
Average
|
|
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2
|
66.8
|
66.2
|
75.7
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Good
|
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Motorola RAZR XT910
|
74.7
|
66.6
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82.1
|
Very Good
|
|
HTC Desire
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76.6
|
75.7
|
84.6
|
Excellent
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Messaging and email
The messaging interface is quite straightforward: there are no folders here, just a new message button. Under that button is a list of all your messages organized into threads.
Swiping on a message header will do exactly the same as in the phonebook - a left swipe starts a new message, while swiping to the right will start a call.
The Galaxy Ace 2 messaging mode and swipe functions
There's application-specific search that lets you quickly locate a message among all your stored SMS and MMS.
When you add multimedia content to the message, it automatically turns into an MMS. You can either quickly add a photo or an audio file to go with the text, or compose an MMS using all the available features (like multiple slides, slide timing, layout, etc.). The multiple slides are all shown inside the compose box.
Adding any multimedia content automatically turns an SMS into an MMS
Moving on to email, the Gmail app supports batch operations, which allows multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted. Multiple Gmail accounts are also supported.
The Gmail interface must be familiar to everyone by now
There is also a generic email app for all your other email accounts and it can support multiple POP or IMAP inboxes. You have access to the original folders that are created online, side by side with the standard local ones such as inbox, drafts and sent items.
It offers a combined inbox option, which color-codes emails from different accounts for easier sorting and viewing. Conversation layout is also available - it groups related emails into single entries with a number in parenthesis showing the number of emails grouped. A tap on that entry expands it to show a list of the individual messages.
The standard email app is easy to set up
Google Talk handles Instant Messaging. The G-Talk network is compatible with a variety of popular clients like Pidgin, Kopete, iChat and Ovi Contacts. Video chat support is also onboard here.
As far as text entry goes, you have the standard Samsung keyboard at your disposal, with an XT9 option. Text input is quite comfortable for the range thanks to the bigger screen. Swype comes preinstalled too, you can switch to that in the Language and Keyboard submenu of the general Settings. It would've been more convenient to have that option in the dedicated settings of the keyboard itself.
Samsung Android keyboard
Gingerbread gallery and My Files
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 uses the standard Android gallery. It automatically locates the images and videos no matter where they are stored.
The standard Android gallery
Little about the Gallery should surprise you. It displays full resolution images and supports double tap and pinch zoom. Sharing images over Bluetooth, email and MMS is enabled, and so is uploading to Picasa or using DLNA to push the image to a compatible TV.
The Gallery offers only a few editing and sharing options
The My Files app is a simple to use but efficient file manager. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, even send multiple files via Bluetooth. My Files will only browse the memory card and the large internal storage (it can't access the system drive).
The My Files app
Music player has DNSe, 5.1ch virtualization
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 uses the standard TouchWiz music player. Samsung have enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with the sound-enhancing DNSe technology and 5.1 channel virtualization.
By default, tracks are sorted into four categories - All, Playlists, Albums and Artists. From the settings, you can add or remove categories to set up the music player just the way you like it.
The music player is great • The DNSe settings • A now-playing interface in the taskbar
The album art has a central place in the Now Playing interface, but you can replace it with an equalizer. You can skip songs by sideways swipes. There's an onscreen scrubber, as well as a volume slider.
Another nice feature allows you to quickly look up a song on YouTube or via Google search by tapping on the track title. The handset will prompt you to select whether to look up the artist, the song title or the album and whether you want to do an Internet search, search your music library or YouTube.
The Now playing interface • Looking up a track
The Music player offers quick shortcuts to play the audio over Bluetooth or DLNA.
In this screen we also found a "Tag" button, which tries to identify the song and automatically fill in any missing ID3 tags (that's info about album, artist, etc.), but that came back with a negative result all too often. The "Lyrics" option in the settings didn't seem to do anything either.
FM radio with RDS
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 is equipped with an FM radio with RDS. The interface is simple - there's a tuning dial and you can save as many as 8 stations as favorites. You can also play on the loudspeaker, but the headset still needs to be plugged in to serve as an antenna.
The FM radio app
Good video player hindered by iffy codec support
The player on the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 can handle the most common video files - MP4, AVI (DivX, XviD) and MKV. But we often ran into problems (even with some old, low-resolution files) and the player would either show a blank screen or fail to play sound.
The video player interface itself is fairly simple, but it covers the basics. You can adjust the brightness independently of the global setting and you can stream the audio over Bluetooth or use DLNA to play the video on another device.
The video player is good, but codec support lets it down
720p files usually played (including DivX, XviD and MKV files), but 1080p didn't work. That is just FYI, since there's no TV-Out and the screen has just WVGA resolution, meaning you'd better stick with SD videos, as it will save storage and you won't see much difference. DTS and AC3 audio aren't supported.
Subtitles in various languages are supported, but you can't load them manually - the video and subtitle files must have the same name. You can adjust the text size and subtitle sync.
Audio output is good
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 did pretty well in our audio quality test. The smartphone was nearly perfect with an active external amplifier and more than decent when a pair of headphones is plugged in.
An active external amplifier lets the Galaxy Ace 2 show its full potential and achieve some excellent scores. It's only averagely loud, but that's just the only bad thing we can say about it here.
The degradation when headphones come into play consists of a moderate hike in stereo crosstalk, and some extra intermodulation distortion. Overall it's a really solid performance.
Very good 5MP camera
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 comes with a 5MP camera and a single LED flash. It captures photos at a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels. There's a front VGA camera for video calling too.
The camera interface is the same as on previous Gingerbread Galaxy devices with two shortcut bars on each side of the viewfinder. On the right you get the still camera / camcorder switch, a virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut.
On the left there's the front-back camera toggle, the flash options and the Settings shortcut. You can add a total of four shortcuts above the Settings shortcut - any four you like in any order.
Camera interface
The Galaxy Ace 2 has rich camera functionality - touch focus, scenes, geotagging, panoramas, smile and blink detection, effects and manual settings for things like ISO, exposure compensation and so on.
The Galaxy Ace 2 produces good images overall but not quite the best in the 5 MP league. Our main issue with the results is that they came out with pretty low contrast and are a bit too soft. Still colors are nicely balanced and the detail is enough for the Ace 2 to be considered a good shooter in times of need.
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 camera samples
Image quality comparison
The Galaxy Ace 2 joins our image quality comparison tool and will face off with the likes of the Xperia U and the LG Optimus L7. The tool's page will give you all the information you'd need on what to look for.
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 in our Photo Compare Tool
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 can capture 720p videos at 30 fps with its main camera and VGA videos with the secondary camera. The camcorder uses the exact same interface as the still camera. You can use effects in the videos, but there's no touch focus.
The camcorder interface is identical to the still camera one
Videos are recorded into MP4 files with a bitrate of 12Mbps, which is pretty good for 720p resolution. The accompanying sound uses the AAC audio codec, but is mono only (64 Kbps bitrate, 44.1 kHz sampling rate).
The framerate hits the 30 fps target easily and videos are very smooth.
We weren't very pleased with the video performance of the Galaxy Ace 2 - despite being smooth the videos lack contrast and the resolved detail isn't nearly as good as on some other 720p-enabled camcorders.
Video quality comparison
The Galaxy Ace 2 enters our video quality comparison tool to square off against the Xperia U and the Optimus L7, check out the results below.
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 in our Video Compare Tool
Streamlined and feature-rich connectivity
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 has dual-band 3G and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support, with HSPA (14.4 Mbps downlink and 5.76 Mbps uplink).
Moving on, there's stereo Bluetooth 3.0 for fast local file transfers. Then there's Wi-Fi b/g/n support, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and a Wi-Fi hotspot option.
The AllShare app allows you to stream content to and from various devices (TV or computer) over DLNA.
NFC will be available in select models. For charging and file transfers there's a MicroUSB port and a microSD card extension.
Connect to a PC wirelessly with Kies Air
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 comes with Kies Air preloaded. The app connects to the local Wi-Fi network (or it can create a Wi-Fi hotspot) and gives you a URL to type into your computer's web browser.
From there you can manage just about anything on the phone - from contacts, messages (including composing messages), to browsing images, videos and other files straight in your desktop browser. You can grant or reject access to computers and see who's connected to the phone at any moment.
The cool thing is you can stream music with handy playback controls. It works for videos too.
Kies Air in Google Chrome
Gingerbread browser is a little behind the ICS/JB curve
The interface of the Android web browser has hardly changed. Its user experience is, as always, flawless.
The Android browser
The browser supports both double tap and pinch zooming along with the new two-finger tilt zoom. There are niceties such as multiple tabs, text reflow, and find on page and so on. A neat trick is to pinch zoom out beyond the minimum - that opens up the tabs view.
Zoomed in view
Yet another neat trick is the browser-specific brightness setting. You can, for example, boost the brightness in the browser to comfortably view your web pages but keep the general brightness low to conserve battery.
Settings
There's Flash 11 support, which means you can watch YouTube videos right in the browser (videos up to 720p worked smoothly) and play Flash games too.
Flash support in action
Samsung Hubs - games, Facebook and more
The Social hub we've seen before - it combines your email accounts with social networking (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and email accounts and shows all incoming messages on one list with handy shortcuts to reply, mark as favorite and so on. There's filtering by message source too, to help manage the inflow of incoming updates.
The Social Hub
The Music Hub lets you browse music online (with search tools, charts, lists of new releases and so on). You can preview songs (30 seconds each) and buy tracks or whole albums.
The Music Hub helps you discover and buy new albums and songs
Finally, there's the Game Hub, which will quickly become your go-to place for finding new games. The titles break down into Social and Premium, and there's a news section, too. You also get to try before you buy. The nice thing about that Hub is it includes the titles by Gameloft, which are otherwise not available on the Android Market.
The Game Hub is great for mobile gaming fans
Impressive office suite
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 comes with Polaris Office preinstalled. It's one of the most feature-rich mobile editors we've seen. You can view, edit and create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents (Office 2003 and Office 2007 are supported) and there's a PDF viewer as well. The app enables searching through your office files just like in a file explorer.
There are a large number of editing options - from font size and style, justification and bulleting options, to table styles. You can easily pick Excel functions from a list too (a feature commonly missing in mobile editors).
Polaris Office
A plethora of organizational tools
The calendar has four different types of view: list, daily, weekly and monthly. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.
The calendar
The list view (often referred to as Agenda view) shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. It's a very handy tool when you need to check your appointments for the next few days.
There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized - the buttons are big enough and easy to hit. Turning the phone landscape reveals more advanced calculator functions.
Calculator • Advanced view
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 features a decent alarm clock application with a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own start time and repeat pattern.
The Clock app and the alarm options
The Memo and Mini Diary are self-explanatory. The first app works with text only, while the Diary lets you also attach pictures.
You also get a To-Do app called Task and a Voice recorder to round off the organizer functionality.
The Memo and Mini Diary • Task handles your To-Do list • The Voice recorder
The latest Google Maps
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 managed to get a GPS lock in just under a minute without A-GPS. A-GPS can speed up the lock (but it involves data traffic). Cell-ID and Wi-Fi positioning are also available if all you need is a rough location, but they need a data connection too.
Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere. You can plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View.
Google Maps
The latest version uses vector maps, which are very data efficient and easy to cache. The app will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.
3D buildings are shown for some of the bigger cities and you can use two-finger camera tilt and rotate to get a better view of the area.
The improved Android Market
The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 has the latest version of the Android Market. Upon launch of the Market app you're greeted with the tiled interface of the Featured window. A swipe to the right takes you to the Categories view.
Swiping to the left takes you through Top Paid, Top Free, Top Grossing, Top New Paid, Top New Free and Trending (the ones with growing popularity). New sections are available such as Staff Picks, Editor's Choice and more.
Android Market
Downloads are easy and won't take more than a couple of seconds. Before you agree to download an app, the Market will show you what features the app requires access to (e.g. Internet connectivity, access to the file system, etc.).
Downloading an app
Overall, Samsung have a winner in the Galaxy Ace 2. This is a very meaningful upgrade over the original and ticks all the right boxes to get in the running for midranger of the year. Now it's up to Samsung to release the ICS update (and if we dare dream, Jelly Bean after that). Anyway, the moment it gets the Ice Cream Sandwich, there will be just the Xperia duo between it and its goal.
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