Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus S7500 preview: First look

Gallery

The Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus uses the standard Android gallery. The gallery automatically locates the images and videos no matter where they are stored. It even imports the online photos from your Google Picasa web albums.

The Android gallery

Little about the Gallery should surprise you. It displays full resolution images and supports double tap and pinch zoom. It supports sharing images over Bluetooth, email, messaging along with uploading to Picasa or using DLNA to push the image to a compatible TV.

There're some basic editing options available right in the gallery: crops, 90-degree rotation and some more advanced features such as image adjustments, effects and selections.

Sharing options • Set as options

Overall it's a nice looking application and works really well with smooth zooming and flipping through images.

Video player

The video player offers a simple list-based interface. It displays all video files stored on the phone and you can sort them by name, date, type or size. The video player also remembers the last viewed position of the video, so you can resume exactly where you left off.

The video player lets you choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen. There's 5.1 channel virtualization and subtitle support. You can change font size and adjust subtitle sync (time them back or forth) but there's no option to manually load subtitles, they have to have the same filename as the video file to load.

Video player app

We spare no praise for the rich codec support on Samsung droids, but the Galaxy Ace Plus is an unfortunate exception. Hardly a surprise either - the original Galaxy Ace was equally disappointing in this regard.

DivX and XviD videos are not supported and even heavier mp4 videos of 720p resolution wouldn't play. We guess that has something to do with the Qualcomm-based chipset, which is rare enough on Galaxy devices.

Music player

The Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus 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 filters to set up the music player just the way you like it.

TouchWiz music player

The album art has a central place in the Now Playing interface, but you can replace it with an equalizer. You can skip songs or FF/rewind by sideways swipes.

The Now playing screen

A nice feature allows you to quickly look up a song on YouTube or via Google search. The handset also prompts you to select whether to look up the artist, the song title or the album.

Music player visualizations

If you minimize the player you'll still get control over your music - it's displayed on the lockscreen and the notification area. It's a basic set of controls: play/pause and skip.

Now playing screen on lockscreen and notifications area

The Samsung Galaxy Ace is also equipped with a stereo FM radio with RDS support. All it needs is a headphone set to be plugged in and you're good to go. Tuning into stations is easily done by two back and forth arrows. You can save frequencies, enable loudspeaker playback and more.

The FM Radio app