The Boulton Bugle

Well the lovely folks at Three and Brando have once again given me another mobile phone on a fortnight’s trial and this time it’s the Samsung Galaxy Ace - an Android phone running version 2.2 of the operating system, and after immediately thinking “this looks a lot like an iPhone 4” started to put it through it’s paces….. The phone comes supplied with a choice of two back covers, a shiny white one and a ridged black one which provides excellent grip and stability when the phone is placed on a shiny surface - nice touch. A mention firstly for the Galaxy Ace’s screen - it’s a really impressive display, a 3.5” HVGA TFT LCD affair - sharp, bright, colourful and extremely responsive with only the very minimum of pressure required.  All the usual pre-installed Android apps are supplied and also included are trial versions of Brickbreaker Revolution, Bejeweled and Tetris.  I was particularly impressed by the fact that a full version of the excellent Seesmic Twitter app comes pre-installed but not the latest version (this can be updated via the Android Market however) and also the free version of Shazam.  Also supplied is ThinkFree Office, a MS Office-compatible suite of programs so the Galaxy Ace is certainly well equipped.  Also supplied is Samsung’s own SocialHub app for displaying texts, Facebook and Twitter updates all in one place. My current mobile is the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini which I had, until now, considered to be pretty powerful and zippy but with an 800 MHz processor under the hood of the Galaxy Ace and it being the first Android phone I’d tried running 2.2 was curious to see if the existing apps I had installed on my X10 Mini experienced an improvement in speed and response on the Galaxy Ace so I logged in and installed TweetDeck (my Twitter app of choice), Foursquare, Friendcaster (excellent and far superior Facebook app) and also tried the improved GMail.  GMail in particular showed a dramatic increase, the GMail app on my X10 Mini takes forever to update and display new messages but this took literally a few seconds on the Galaxy Ace.  The other three apps were also considerably faster and a lot more enjoyable to use, in fact everything on the Galaxy Ace positively zips along! The supplied web browser is excellent featuring full pinch-to-zoom, always a handy feature for viewing full web pages.  Moving on to the Ace’s camera, this is a 5MP camera auto-focus affair with LED flash and the test photos I took with it were crisp and certainly of decent enough quality for e-mailing, displaying on a computer or in a digital photo frame or uploading to Facebook and Twitter. A widget I found especially useful was the Program Monitor (I’m assuming this is a supplied widget with 2.2 only as I don’t have it on my X10 Mini), which is effectively a built-in task killer, enabling you to stop background apps/games from running with just a touch of one button, an excellent widget to supply.  The battery life is excellent, with fairly moderate use I got about 2 days battery out of it before the message was displayed advising me to connect the charger. To sum up, I really liked the Galaxy Ace as an Android phone, it looks great, the screen is fabulous and responsive and thanks to the processor it’s a powerful phone too and extremely well equipped, I would have no hesitation in recommending this phone, it’s a pleasure to use and thanks once again to the kind folks at Three and Brando for loaning it to me, it’s gone straight into my list of mobiles to for possible upgrade next April when I’m eligible to do so on my contract.

Well the lovely folks at Three and Brando have once again given me another mobile phone on a fortnight’s trial and this time it’s the Samsung Galaxy Ace - an Android phone running version 2.2 of the operating system, and after immediately thinking “this looks a lot like an iPhone 4” started to put it through it’s paces…..

The phone comes supplied with a choice of two back covers, a shiny white one and a ridged black one which provides excellent grip and stability when the phone is placed on a shiny surface - nice touch.

A mention firstly for the Galaxy Ace’s screen - it’s a really impressive display, a 3.5” HVGA TFT LCD affair - sharp, bright, colourful and extremely responsive with only the very minimum of pressure required.  All the usual pre-installed Android apps are supplied and also included are trial versions of Brickbreaker Revolution, Bejeweled and Tetris.  I was particularly impressed by the fact that a full version of the excellent Seesmic Twitter app comes pre-installed but not the latest version (this can be updated via the Android Market however) and also the free version of Shazam.  Also supplied is ThinkFree Office, a MS Office-compatible suite of programs so the Galaxy Ace is certainly well equipped.  Also supplied is Samsung’s own SocialHub app for displaying texts, Facebook and Twitter updates all in one place.

My current mobile is the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini which I had, until now, considered to be pretty powerful and zippy but with an 800 MHz processor under the hood of the Galaxy Ace and it being the first Android phone I’d tried running 2.2 was curious to see if the existing apps I had installed on my X10 Mini experienced an improvement in speed and response on the Galaxy Ace so I logged in and installed TweetDeck (my Twitter app of choice), Foursquare, Friendcaster (excellent and far superior Facebook app) and also tried the improved GMail.  GMail in particular showed a dramatic increase, the GMail app on my X10 Mini takes forever to update and display new messages but this took literally a few seconds on the Galaxy Ace.  The other three apps were also considerably faster and a lot more enjoyable to use, in fact everything on the Galaxy Ace positively zips along!

The supplied web browser is excellent featuring full pinch-to-zoom, always a handy feature for viewing full web pages.  Moving on to the Ace’s camera, this is a 5MP camera auto-focus affair with LED flash and the test photos I took with it were crisp and certainly of decent enough quality for e-mailing, displaying on a computer or in a digital photo frame or uploading to Facebook and Twitter.

A widget I found especially useful was the Program Monitor (I’m assuming this is a supplied widget with 2.2 only as I don’t have it on my X10 Mini), which is effectively a built-in task killer, enabling you to stop background apps/games from running with just a touch of one button, an excellent widget to supply.  The battery life is excellent, with fairly moderate use I got about 2 days battery out of it before the message was displayed advising me to connect the charger.

To sum up, I really liked the Galaxy Ace as an Android phone, it looks great, the screen is fabulous and responsive and thanks to the processor it’s a powerful phone too and extremely well equipped, I would have no hesitation in recommending this phone, it’s a pleasure to use and thanks once again to the kind folks at Three and Brando for loaning it to me, it’s gone straight into my list of mobiles to for possible upgrade next April when I’m eligible to do so on my contract.

  1. markboulton44 posted this