Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus

The Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus is the heir of the successful Galaxy Ace and it is an improvement over its predecessor. However, the improvement falls a little flat.

The model available for review had a 3.65 capacitive HVGA screen, a 1GHz processor, 512MB of Ram, a five megapixel camera, a micro-SD slot and Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread.

This handset is is sturdy enough. The screen is standard size and gives decent real estate, with a good capacitive touch. However, the HVGA is a let down and falls behind the latest display technology somewhat. The 1GHz processor is fast for a phone that has mid-range specs and the RAM handles the mundane tasks well.

Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread was a successful operating system when it was launched and there are millions of handsets sporting it, but since its launch in December 2010, Gingerbread has been superseded by two operating systems from Android and another, Jelly Beans, has already been announced.

We have seen handsets from other manufacturers with similar specs but based on Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich. Samsung includes its TouchWiz 4 interface with several handy apps which may make up for this.

The Galaxy Ace Plus supports Flash but zooming in and out of web pages was not smooth at all. The 5MP camera takes average, decent pictures. Calls and SMS were adequate but battery life is poor.

This is an adequate phone, but its retail price is its major weakness. There are similarly-priced smartphones from competing manufacturers with much better specs or cheaper models with similar specs if money is an issue.

The Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus was made available for review by Vodafone Malta.