It's really a shame that the Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus is only running Android 2.3 rather than the snazzy new Ice Cream Sandwich. To our eyes, the software looks a little dated but then those of you who haven't spent the last two days using various Ice Cream Sandwich phones non stop probably won't have that issue.
There's also Samsung's TouchWiz interface to contend with, and all the bright colours and juvenile icons it brings with it.
The 1GHz processor is a welcome addition, though, speeding through menu screens and opening apps with no lag.
Where we did encounter a couple of delays, however, was using the camera. It's a little slow to start up, as well as being a little slow to take photos. However, once the shutter fires, the photo takes pretty quickly – we didn't find we had many blurry shots at the end of our session. There are some nice features too, like continuous shooting. The video recording function also works fine – nothing to write home about but it gets the job done.
Watching video on the handset is also nothing particularly spectacular but it seems to be fast and largely judder free.
Music playback seemed to work fine, although we can't vouch for the sound quality of the handset given the background roar of MWC that largely drowned any semblance of a melody out.
Early verdict
It's hard to get excited about a handset like the Galaxy Ace Plus. It's an update to an already very average mid-range Android handset – we can only applaud the greater processing power and the larger screen, but we'd be more excited if this was a mid-range Ice Cream Sandwich handset or one that came with, say, a free puppy.
Like most mid-tier handsets, the success of the Ace Plus is going to come down to price. If it's available on an attractive PAYG package, we can see it being a bit of a steal – after all, a 1GHz processor and Android 2.3? A few months ago those would've been top end specs.
