Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus S7500 preview: First look

Camera

The Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus comes with a 5MP camera and a single LED flash. It captures photos at a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels.

The camera interface is the same as on previous Galaxy devices with two shortcut bars on each side of the viewfinder. On the right you get the still camera / camcorder switch, a virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut.

On the left there's Scenes, flash on/off/auto, effects and settings.

Camera UI

The Galaxy Ace Plus' image samples show a slight drop in quality compared to the Ace. They have less detail than the predecessor and color rendering is worse. There isn't much noise in the photos, but that's mostly down to to the aggressive noise reduction that tends to smear away some fine detail.

Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus camera samples

Overall, it's a decent performer but probably middle of the 5 MP league.

Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus camera samples

Video recording

Although the Galaxy Ace Plus has a 1 GHz processor, video recording is capped at VGA. This isn't much, considering 720p has become something of a given. But certainly better than the 15fps QVGA videos of the original Ace.

Camcorder UI

Here is a video sample for you to check out.

Web browser

The interface of the Android web browser has hardly changed. Its user experience is, as always, flawless.

The Android browser

The browser supports both double tap and pinch zooming along with the new two-finger tilt zoom. There are niceties such as multiple tabs, text reflow, and find on page. A neat trick is to pinch zoom out beyond the minimum - that opens up the tabs view.

Tab view • Landscape view

Yet another neat trick is the browser-specific brightness setting. You can, for example, boost the brightness in the browser to comfortably view your web pages but keep the general brightness low to conserve battery.

Web browser settings

There's Flash 11 support, which means you can watch YouTube videos right in the browser (videos up to 720p worked smoothly) and play Flash games too.

Playing a YouTube video • Playing a flash game in Kongregate

First impressions

While offering a fairly smooth Android experience, the Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus isn't terribly exciting. On a second thought, excitement doesn't probably rate as highly in the midrange as reliability and familiarity. The Plus is supposed to cater mostly to users who won't necessarily put hammer to the piggy to get themselves a smartphone.

Anyone coming from an entry-level smartphone can easily get on board with the Galaxy Ace Plus. We don't expect the price to be much of an issue, so even newcomers to the smartphone game could quickly come to grips with a package like the Ace Plus.

The Samsung Galaxy Ace was a sound all-round performer for a sensible buck, leaving the Plus with a job to do. Upon a casual scan of the spec sheet, it doesn't come across as a massive upgrade but Samsung have done well to address some of the original's shortcomings. The Ace Plus has adequate inbuilt storage, the browser supports Flash and the video recording usable, at least.

Add an up-to-date connectivity and software package with the latest TouchWiz and Gingerbread, and the Galaxy Ace Plus S7500 has more than enough to work with when introducing itself to future users.