Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 review

Not everyone wants to spend a fortune on a top-end smartphone, and Samsung and the like – with the arguable exception of Apple – know that. At the same time, budget phones can make big compromises for price. The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 is Samsung’s stab at the perfect middle-ground phone, it’s cheap on contract, and has everything that most people really need.

It’s smaller than the slightly more expensive Samsung Galaxy S Advance and it lacks the larger super AMOLED display of that model too, but it still has a respectable specification. It has an 800MHz dual-core processor and a 5-megapixel rear camera with an LED flash. Even though it isn’t super AMOLED, its display is still bright and colourful with great contrast.

Its interface has silky smooth animations and well-rendered icons. The usual Phone, Messaging and Applications icons are located at the base of the screen, and underneath those are three physical buttons: Back, Menu and Home. The smooth and responsive user interface, on a phone at this price, really gives the Galaxy Ace 2 a higher-class feel.

The Galaxy Ace 2 implements Android’s camera interface brilliantly. It has two cameras: a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a VGA-resolution forward-facing camera. The forward-facing camera is great for Facebook snaps and video messaging, but nothing more. Its rear-facing camera, on the other hand, takes excellent photos for a smartphone, making it a great alternative to a basic point-and-click digital camera. It has a flash, a number of different shooting modes such as panorama, smile shot and geotagging. The camera interface is responsive and smooth.

The Galaxy Ace 2’s home screens are packed with worthwhile and useful apps that include a media player, photo editor and Polaris Office. We had no problem working with our test productivity documents, even those saved in the new MS Office file format.

The Galaxy Ace 2 quickly downloaded and installed BBC iPlayer, and the programmes we watched were fairly smooth, but there was an intermittent jerkiness to them. For comparison, the same programme played smoothly on our test iPhone 3GS using the same Wi-Fi connection at the same time. We had no problems watching our locally stored Xvid and H.264 test videos, but our DivX only played audio, not video, our MKV video played so slowly it was unwatchable and our MOV video didn’t play at all.

The Samsung is great for web browsing, though. The pages render quickly, scroll smoothly and look fantastic. The Galaxy Ace 2 rendered the BBC News page in just 10 seconds, beating the LG Optimus L7 by a good seven seconds. It may have a smaller screen than the S Advance, but this is a still a great phone if you often browse the web.

Sadly, its internal storage is minimal. You get 1.1GB of storage space for apps and media, which is nowhere near enough for a decent collection; thankfully you can install a micro SD card with a capacity up to 32GB for around £15, making it a far more media-friendly device.

CONCLUSION

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 was a hugely popular phone in its day, back in 2012 when it was playing second fiddle to the then mighty Samsung Galaxy S3. We were very positive about the handset when we first saw it, but it hasn’t dropped in price sufficiently to still make it a contender today.

Prices range considerably for this ageing phone, with its dual-core 800MHz processor and its 3.8in, 480×800 resolution display, but you can still pay well over £100 for one from a high street retailer. Which is pretty crazy given its age and what you could buy instead.

The best example is the brilliant Motorola Moto G. It has a fast processor, the latest version of Android and a HD 1,280,720 display. It’s the budget phone to beat all other budget phones, and many more expensive ones too. You can pick it up for as little as £100 from O2 at present.