Samsung Ace Review

Camera:

The 1.3 megapixel camera will also record 320x240 pixel videos, good enough for YouTube. The camera takes crisp pictures with decent color representation, but pictures turned out a bit dark. Options include White Balance adjustment, Self Timer, Black and White, Sepia and Negative Effects and the several shooting modes (single shot, multi shot, mosaic shot, frame shot and night shot.) Digital zoom is available up to 4x.

Sprint PDA device do not support MMS, so picture and videos must be sent via email or Bluetooth. Messages are received as a text, with a URL that will take you to the media via PIE.


Multimedia:

The Ace ships with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, which handles both audio and video playback. It will search your device and storage card for any multimedia files and add them to the library. It is further sorted by Artist, Album and Genre for easy access.

WMP does not support album art, so during audio playback the interface is mostly empty though clean. At the top right is the song, with smaller text below that rotates between artist, genre and bitrate information. To the right is the song rating, on a scale of 0-5 stars. On the bottom left is the time (which can show either elapsed or remaining,) in the middle is Previous Track, Play/Pause, and Next Track and on the right is the volume level. Playback is controlled through the d-pad. The player has options for Shuffle/Repeat and it is capable of creating Playlists.

Video playback uses the same interface, with the video being displayed in the middle. The added memory makes video playback smoother than we have seen in the past, especially when multi-tasking with other applications.

Windows Media Player 10 is capable of playing the following files:
AUDIO: .MP3, .WMA
VIDEO: .WMV, H.263 - .3GP and .MP4

Also along for the ride is SprintTV and Radio. It runs the same new interface found since the Muziq and RAZR2, there isn’t anything new here. The larger, landscape screen is tailor-made for TV viewing, and like the Q9c it looks very good.


Software:

Inexplicably, Office Mobile is not included with the Ace, nor is Adobe PDF viewer. Instead it has File Viewer, which is actually Boratech File Viewer v2.04. The program is adequate at best; it does indeed let you view Office documents and PDF files, but you have to zoom in about ten times when launching a file before you can actually read it, and it does not support Office 2007 documents, which are ending in .***x. Needless to say, it does not support any document editing either. For a device targeted to the international business traveler the lack of Office Mobile is a bitter disappointment.

The phone comes preloaded with Live Search and Sprint’s On Demand applications, and there are countless other programs that can be downloaded both for free and for purchase. Documents to Go is one we would recommend, given that Office Mobile is missing.