Samsung Galaxy Ace User Review Part 1 - The basics(Update: Gingerbread review included)

Samsung Galaxy ace is a mid-range(High-end in our country) Froyo powered android smart phone. I am writing this post after regular use of this phone for one month.

The Looks and Feel

Samsung Galaxy ace is definitely a looker. It is sure to steal some eyes when you take it out of your pocket or bag. There is an indisputable resemblance to iphone 4 but not to an extend as to mistake it. The chrome covering on the sides give the phone a very high class look.

Samsung Galaxy Ace

The Galaxy Ace feels lighter than it looks. When you take the phone in your hands it has more of a plastic feel than a solid feel and even the buttons on chrome bezel feel plasticky. But still hats off to the design guys at samsung who made a classy look with cheaper components.
Front panel is claimed to be made of Gorilla glass. The panel is like museum for fingerprints as every touch is preserved safely until replaced by another touch. The panel needs constant cleansing if you want the perfect looks. Otherwise the glossy finish makes the fingerprints very obvious even in a flash. I am not sure about the gorilla glass thing but my phone does not have any scratches after one month of normal usage and two accidental drops.
Back panel by default is a textured one. The texturing gives holding the phone a lot secure feel. The accessory back cover is a white one with smooth finish and a low-class plastic feel.
Update: Turns out the build quality of the phone isn't so bad. Here is a drop test of samsung galaxy ace 

The Screen

Galaxy ace sports an HVGA screen ( 480 x320 resolution). The LCD display in galaxy ace is inferior to the AMOLED ones but definitely good at doing its job.

Lowest setting of brightness is more than enough for indoor usage. But in strong sunlight you won't be able to clearly distinguish the texts. Sunlight legibility is moderately acceptable only in the highest brightness setting, which renders the screen more pixelated. High brightness setting in low light condition strained my eye a little bit so I suggest you use a low brightness setting indoors.

There are two ways for controlling the brightness. One is through the power control widget on home screen which controls brightness in three stops and other is by brightness option in the display settings which offer finer control over brightness.

The Call

Finding the network and connecting to it is plainly easy for this phone.The phone gets quickly connected to a network after coming out of a airplane mode. I never had to wait more than 6 seconds after disabling flight mode to connect to my network. The phone also maintains this connection without drops most of the time.

Samsung Galaxy ace's ability to handle calls in a low-intensity network area better than any other phones I used.  The area where galaxy ace performs poorly is call handling while on movement. Most of the calls I made during my travel by train dropped and many a times call dropped repeatedly. I don't know if it is the problem of the carrier or the phone.

The virtual touch pad for making call is equipped with smart dialing function. For Eg. if you press 2 and 3 the dialer will search for combination of 23 and all the combinations of letters represented on these buttons ie A to F. This was a pretty useful function for me as I could start typing as soon as the dialer comes up, without any confusion.

Galaxy ace default dialer

Emergency dialer is the dialer you can access from the lock screen which is a bare skeleton of the original dialer. I don't know why the letters are given along with the numbers in the emergency dialer as the smart dialing and access to the phone book are absent. See the emergency dialer below

Voice quality of the calls perceived at my end is good but the phone is not loud enough to hear clearly when I am in a noisy area. I think the in built microphone does a decent job as I had multiple instances of enquiry about milder surrounding noises, a sign of good sensitivity (may also be showing absence of noise cancellation, but I never had a complaint of not hearing me).


The in-call screen has options to hold the call initiate another call and an additional touch pad to punch in numbers for IVRS (interactive voice response system , like the customer care of your carrier) calls.
Below is a sample call screen.

Dialing screen

In-call screen

One nice touch by the graphics team is the change in the appearance of the call screen on ringing and the person picking it up. Nice green hue and appearance of a timer and hold button tells you that the other person has picked up the call . So you do not have to bring the phone to ear until the person picks up the call and that too without the usage of a loud speaker ( In the pic loud speaker is on because I had to take screen shot while talking in a call) .

Speaking of the loud speaker, the one in my Galaxy ace is malfunctioning. Sound is poorer than any $5 speaker. Sound begins trembling when the volume is punched up above the half way. There are only two or three ring tones that I can set without making the listener think of a crap phone before seeing my phone. I am planning for a visit to customer care on this.

One thing that is missing from the call function is the ability to record phone calls. I don't know why this function is omitted in android as most other phones from $40 price range has this.

Update : Gingerbread 2.3.4 update actually removed the different coloration of the dialling and in-call screen. The gray hue is now present in both the screens.
The emergency dialler and the default one stayed the same.

SMS

Combined sms and mms screen

The combined SMS  and MMS application is an intuitive one. Attaching a multimedia file automatically converts an sms in to mms, and on removing the file it gets converted back.

Only mild glitch I had with this app was the close proximity of the send button which I accidentally pressed more than twice, sending half baked sms to the receiver.

SMS sending even while connected as a hotspot appeared fine to me, as I was unable to find any noticeable break of connection of data network.

The Battery

The battery of Samsung Galaxy Ace is quoted at 1350 mAh, But in reality it doesn't do justice to the label. Squeezing it to even one complete day with the use of mobile data network(EDGE in here, no 3G) is a daunting task. Turn on the GPS and WiFi, and you got a dead battery in half a day.

Above screen shows the results of typical battery usage. Battery level was 30% , GPS and wifi were off but data syncing with 2G network was on, till the time of taking this screenshot.

You can see that 73% of the charge was used for network standby, which amounts to about 15 hrs. Doing the math I assume a maximum life of 30hrs of normal usage with one full recharge.

Update: When I upgraded the phone to gingerbread, I first got  drop in battery performance which got me wondering the cause of this. Because the update promised an improved battery life.

After a little bit of installing and uninstalling I found that a Network monitor app started draining the battery more that it did on the froyo. After uninstalling it things got back to an improved state as was promised. And now the battery is staying for some more time than the previous froyo.

Battery Charging Time

Samsung Galaxy Ace supports USB charging and it does not need a switched-on device at the other end for charging. Means if your laptop has powered USB ports you can charge the mobile using USB cable even when laptop is in shut down state. But you won't be able to switch off the USB charging to preserve the laptop battery.

Typical USB charging time is approximately 2hrs and 30 minutes  (From 10% to fully charged, without any breaks or calls.)

Charging Time with the supplied charger is on an average 2hrs 15 minutes for me with the settings same as above.

The battery charge status indicator is a highly inaccurate one in samsung galaxy ace. When the charging is started the level indicator quickly rise upto 53 or 54% in about 15 minutes and then ascends slowly. There is one more quick jump I noticed many times is the jump from 88 to 100%. It continued for about 40 minutes as '100% and charging' status and then only showed the advice to unplug the charger.
See the battery graph

See the 'Battery fully charged' notification for samsung galaxy ace below

100% indicator in notification bar

Full charge Alert

Read the complete battery review of samsung galaxy ace
Conclusion

Galaxy Ace excellent mobile with poor stamina. The phone serves the basic functions quiet easily without many glitches.  But expanding the horizons of mobile use by experimenting with this phone is slightly limited because of the battery.

Update: The connectivity options in Galaxy ace is reviewed in part 2 of this post