Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830 review: Ace in the hole

The Galaxy Ace S5830 is among the first Froyo-powered smartphones in the Samsung lineup. It comes with the TouchWiz, launcher preinstalled. There are four buttons docked at the bottom of the homescreen, which stay there even when you open the app drawer.

   
The TouchWiz 3.0 user interface comes preinstalled on top of the Android OS

The customizations start on the homescreen where you have up to seven panes to populate with widgets but you don’t have to use all the screens all the time. If you need less, deleting the extra ones will speed up navigation. You can zoom out with a pinch gesture to the enter edit mode,where you can add, remove and rearrange the homescreen panes as you see fit.

The notification area, one of the Android strong points, is the updated variety we saw on the Galaxy S Giorgio Armani - it has five switches for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, sound and rotation-lock.

  
The notification area and the lockscreen

Pressing the menu button on the homescreen and then selecting add will let you put more content on your homescreen homescreen (a press and hold on the homescreen does the same trick), add/delete homescreen panes or change the wallpaper. Live wallpapers are supported too, though there is only one preinstalled and you will have to get the rest from the market. The contextual menu has shortcuts too for search, notifications and settings.

    
Homescreen edit mode • Wallpaper menu • The widget list

Typically the main menu consists of side-scrollable panes, much like the homescreen, instead of a vertical scrollable grid (like in the vanilla Android). List view is not available.

   
The main menu • Edit the homescreen panes with pinch zoon out gesture • standard edit mode

You can edit the menu just like you do the homescreen: pinch to zoom out and you can add new or re-arrange the current menu panes.

The menu has an alternative edit mode, which lets you rearrange and uninstall applications (only those that you have installed and not the preinstalled ones).

An interesting change in the Android 2.2-compatible version of Samsung’s TouchWiz launcher is the built-in task manager. Complete with a homescreen widget that shows the number of currently active apps, it saves you the need to install a task killer.

    
The task manager • the task widget in the center of the homescreen

Here are some benchmarks of the Galaxy Ace:

    
Quadrant • Neocore • Linpack • BenchmarkPi

 
Samsung I9000 Galaxy S (Android 2.2 Froyo, 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM)