Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus review: Aces wild

Slick gallery and file browser

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 standard 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.

The Gallery also offers some editing options - cropping, 90-degree rotation and some more advanced features such as image adjustments, effects and selections.

The Gallery offers several image editing 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

TouchWiz music player

The Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus uses the standard TouchWiz music player. Samsung have enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with 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 • Choosing which categories to use

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.

Another 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.

The Now playing interface • Looking up a track

Simple yet powerful video player

The player on the Samsung Galaxy Ace can handle 3GP and MP4 video files. DivX/XviD support is missing, but at least we had no problems playing videos at up to WVGA resolution. Never mind the higher clock speed, Qualcomm processors aren't famous for wide video codec support.

720p videos wouldn't play, but that's overkill on a HVGA display anyway. But you're not limited to the Galaxy Ace display. Thanks to DLNA you can view photos and videos on compatible hardware - like TVs or computers with the right software (the latest version of Windows Media player for example).

The video player interface itself is as simple and as it could possibly be - there almost isn't one. You can use the Gallery or the My Files app to browse videos. The on-screen controls boil down to play/pause and skip buttons as well as a scrollable progress bar.

Don't let the video player's simplistic interface deceive you

Decent audio quality

Samsung S7500 Galaxy Ace Plus pulled off a decent, if unspectacular performance in our audio quality test. The smartphone did well with an active external amplifier and decent when a pair of headphones is plugged in.

An active external amplifier lets the Galaxy Ace Plus show its full potential and achieve some excellent scores. It's not particularly loud and its frequency response could be better, but the other readings are as good as they should be.

The degradation when headphones come into play consists of a huge hike in stereo crosstalk, and some extra intermodulation distortion. The rest of the scores remained pretty decent so it seems the Galaxy Ace Plus is ready to offer more than what the average user needs.

And here come the full results so you can see for yourselves:

Samsung S7500 Galaxy Ace Plus frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.