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The Samsung Galaxy Ace ticks all the essentials boxes while failing to add any marks in the other comments box and win praise for progressing beyond the norm.
The handset's messaging abilities are wholeheartedly standard, with a basic selection of options and features laid out in an Android-basic, user-friendly manner.
As with many of Samsung's recent market-headlining handsets, the Samsung Galaxy Ace makes the most of the company's TouchWiz UI, boasting the much-loved and highly coveted Swype input functionality.
A welcome inclusion and a standout favourite when composing texts, emails or general notes, the handset's Swype features enable you to compose messages quickly and with little fuss, simply by dragging your fingers between desired keys. This removes the need to make endless individual digital button taps to complete a message.
It's so popular it's even been included in the stock version of Android, known as Jelly Bean, as a method of entering text, and the other big keyboard makers like Swiftkey have integrated it too.
Swype on the Samsung Galaxy Ace is of further benefit when taking into account the otherwise cramped and compact nature of the handset's touchscreen keyboard when holding the device in a standard portrait manner.
Switching the handset to a landscape stance offers a more spacious, finger-friendly full QWERTY keyboard offering.
But thanks to its quick input shortcuts, the Swype software provides one of the best input methods beyond the physical QWERTY keyboards offered by a number of BlackBerry handsets.
Messages are displayed as threads, which makes it easy to follow a conversation.
Webmail and email are easy to set up and are fast to pick up new messages. The application is basic, but works well.
The Galaxy Ace also comes with a Social Hub app, which incorporates all messages you've received on different platforms including SMS, email, Facebook and Twitter.
On first glance, this sounds like an interesting tool, but when you use it you soon find out that messages on the social network platforms can only be read once the application opens up a web browser, meaning that it doesn't actually simplify anything.
