Samsung Galaxy Ace 3 Review

Samsung may be king of the hill in the world of high-end Android smartphones, but the firm hasn't turned its back on other market sectors. So while top-end devices like the Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note 3 may grab headlines, Samsung also has plenty of cheaper options on offer, such as the Galaxy Trend, the Galaxy Core and the Galaxy Ace series. As you'd expect, the Ace 3 is the third Ace handset to hit stores, and it lands with a pretty classic spec sheet. It sports a 4" screen with 800 x 480 pixels, a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM and a 5-Megapixel camera with 720p HD movie recording. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and even 4G LTE at up to 150 Mbps.

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 3 4G is out now and sells for around £250, although it'll no doubt come down in price over the coming months.

Design

A far cry from phablets and their constantly increasing dimensions, the Ace 3 is a compact smartphone measuring 121.2 x 62.7 x 10 mm. This handset is easy to use in a single hand, as your thumb covers the whole screen without having to strain too far. Build quality is good on the whole. Given this phone's price tag, it's no surprise to see no high-end materials used here, but the plastic casing is decent quality. The rounded design is pleasant enough too, even if it has been a regular feature of Samsung's phone range for the last two years. The only slight downside is the phone's weight. At 119.5 g, the Ace 3 isn't heavy per se, but given its relatively compact size, it tends to feel quite weighty.

 Display

The 4" display in the Galaxy Ace 3 isn't disastrous but it's nothing to write home about. While it stands out for a speedy touch-response time of 92 ms, the other test results were considerably less impressive. We measured the Delta E at 5.4 (it should be 0-3 for colours to be considered "accurate"), the contrast at 503:1, the maximum brightness at 405 cd/m² and the colour temperature at 8535 K. There's room for improvement on every front. Still, like we said, it's not a total disaster, and those results are by no means catastrophic. In fact, the screen is decent enough on the whole. The screen's WVGA resolution (800 x 480 pixels)—which makes for pixel density of 233 ppi—isn't high enough to get the best out of the onboard web browser, but pages can still be read reasonably well if you're prepared to flip the phone round into landscape mode then zoom in and out now and again.

Interface & Navigation

Although the Ace 3 is technically one of Samsung's entry-level smartphones, it has still been treated to the firm's home-grown TouchWiz interface, seen here over Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Regular Samsung users will therefore be right at home. The interface has a main menu featuring several homescreens that can be customised with widgets and shortcuts to apps and folders. It also features a handy notifications bar and lock/unlock screens. It's all pretty standard stuff.

 It may not be anything particularly special, but TouchWiz does the job just fine. It's not revolutionary, but it has no major flaws.

The Ace 3 runs on a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM. It's therefore no surprise to see that it doesn't excel in the various benchmark tests we ran it through. But that's no big deal. In spite of its relatively modest tech specs, this Galaxy handset runs OK. So long as you don't drown it with heavyweight tasks, it generally stays smooth and responsive, even if there are still a few lags here and there in the interface. Still, demanding users may soon get frustrated with this mobile's limited performances.

Multimedia

The Galaxy Ace 3 is no multimedia powerhouse. That said, it covers the basics. The built-in video player copes well enough with movies up to 720p. However, Full HD causes considerably more problems ... but that's no great loss with a 800 x 480-pixel screen. Otherwise, subtitles can be read easily onscreen without straining your eyes. This smartphone can play all the most popular video formats natively (MKV, Xvid), with the notable exception of DivX. The audio player fares slightly better, with a clean sound and decent output levels. It's also packed with functions, including a whole load of equalisers to play around with, and has a handy function for searching for videos on YouTube.

Camera

With a 5-Megapixel main camera and a 0.3-Megapixel front-facing webcam, the Galaxy Ace 3 doesn't promise great things here. In fact, it doesn't really improve on the Ace 2. Still, Megapixels aren't everything, so we still held out some hope that Samsung may have improved picture quality in this updated model.
 

Unfortunately, that's not the case. While colours are generally fine, contrasted scenes are poorly handled, dynamic range is limited, there's a bit too much noise and detail is often lacking. The same can be said for 720p HD video (1280 x 720 pixels), which also lacks detail. On the upside, the camera has plenty of modes to play around with, and the photo/video interface is versatile.


Battery

From the look of the tech specs, we could have hoped that the 1800 mAh battery would have been enough to keep the Galaxy Ace 3 running for a decent amount of time. Unfortunately, that's not the case, as with a score of 24633 in our battery benchmark test, this smartphone proved disappointing. It proved just as unimpressive in practice too. In general, it can last a full day away from the plug socket so long as you don't go too crazy using loads of power-hungry applications like games and movies. If you really hammer app and media usage, the Ace 3 will struggle to make it to the evening on a single charge.

Source by digitalversus.com