Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830 preview: First look

Messaging capabilities and text input

The Samsung Galaxy Ace can handle all common types of messages with ease - SMS, MMS and email. Email support (via Gmail and Email apps) is excellent with support for Exchange out of the box and social media buffs will be pleased with the level of integration of that content as well.

Samsung Galaxy Ace comes with the Samsung home-backed keyboard preinstalled. It’s actually much more comfortable (and accurate!) than the often criticized stock Android QWERTY.

The Samsung’s QWERTY keyboard • the Swype-enabled QWERTY keyboard

When you flip the phone on its side, the virtual keyboard automatically switches to the landscape QWERTY, which is much bigger and better to use. It covers most of the screen however, leaving room for only two lines of text.

Voice input us also available and works quite good if you are in quieter environment.

Finally the text input is enhanced by Swype – we covered it thoroughly in the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S review and we won’t go into so much detail here. Swype is a life-saver on the smaller screens (such as the one of the Ace) – you don’t have to be very accurate with your swyping, which makes text input faster and easier. It’s only that, much like with any other text prediction method, it has to support your text entry language.

Swype input in action • Swype suggestions

Familiar gallery

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 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 of your Google Picasa galleries.

The gallery boasts cool 3D effects and transitions, which we find rather attractive.

The albums appear as piles of photos, which fall in neat grids once selected.

The gallery certainly is a looker

Alternatively, you photos can be organized by date with the help of a button in the top right corner which switches between grid and timeline view. In grid view, there’s a date slider, which can also be used to find photos taken on a certain date.

Pinch zooming is also available here thanks to the Galaxy Ace multi-touch support but you can also use double tap or even the +/- virtual buttons.

Looking at a single photo

Zooming and panning is fast and smooth, but there’s a perceptible lag until the actual panning (or zooming) starts, which is slightly annoying.

TouchWiz music player with basic looks

The Samsung Galaxy Ace makes use of the TouchWiz music player. The interface consists of several tabs for the sorting options: current playlist, all tracks, playlists and albums, artists and composers. You are free to remove those you don’t need to make the interface easier to navigate.

We would have really appreciated the TouchWiz music player we saw in Galaxy S Giorgio Armani because of its better looks and Disc View option. We guess it’s reserved only for the Galaxy S lineup.

The music player has benefited greatly from the TouchWiz UI

Samsung has enabled equalizer presets on the Galaxy Ace along with Samsung’s DNSe technology.

Now Playing view • Landscape mode • settings

The nice feature that allows you to quickly look up a song on YouTube or via Google search is also here. The handset also prompts you to select whether to look up the artist, the song title or the album. What’s even better, the YouTube search results are loaded straight into the YouTube client.

Quick search options • Equalizer and DNSe settings