Samsung Ace Cell Phone Review - Organizer
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Alfredo Padilla Published on April 29, 2008 Comment on this |
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Summary
The Ace provides users with powerful PIM applications that synchronize easily with Outlook on your computer. We found that the PIM applications were easy to use and responded fairly quickly, this phone can definitely replace a PDA. |
Synchronization (7.0)
Running Windows Mobile Standard means the Samsung Ace is very good at synchronizing information with your computer. Using Activesync with XP or Windows Mobile Device Manager with Vista you can synchronize contacts, calendars, tasks, notes, files and bookmarks with your computer.
Setting up synchronization is as easy as installing the software and plugging in your device, although you may want to take a look at this article if you have a firewall installed. Synchronization needs to happen over USB at first, but after that you can also synchronize via Bluetooth. You can synchronize with Outlook on an XP or Vista computer and also with Vista's buil in PIM applications. Unfortunately there's no out of the box support for synchronization with other software or platforms, like Eudor, Lotus Notes or a Mac. If you do have a Mac there is an excellent third party program that will allow you to synchronize with your Ace called The Missing Sync.
Alerts (7.0)
Alerts on the Samsung Ace can be set up for both calendar appointments and tasks. For tasks alerts are simple but flexible. You can set the exact time and date it goes off. For calendar appointments you have less flexibility, strangely. Here you have to choose from a list of preset times before the appointment, ranging from 1 minute to 1 week. We wonder why the flexibility of the task alert systems wasn't included, at least as an additional option, for the calendar. In either case you cannot set custom sound and vibration settings for each individual alert, instead the appropriate alert for the profile you have activated at the time it sounds will be used. When an alert sounds you have the option to view, dismiss or snooze it. One of the things we love about Windows Mobile are that you have multiple snooze options so you can decide to have it sound again in five minutes or in a day, with several intervening options. This is much better than other platforms like Symbian S60 that don't provide you with any snooze options.
Over the Air PIM Sync (2.0)
As a Windows Mobile device the Samsung Ace can synchronize calendars, contacts and tasks wirelessly with an Exchange server out of the box. This is a great feature for anyone who works in a corporate environment that uses Exchange or just has their own personal Exchange server. Those who prefer to synchronize with less business oriented services like Google or Yahoo won't be as thrilled, as the Ace doesn't have this capability out of the box. You can install additional software to get this functionality, however.
Adding Contacts (9.84)
It took us an average of 10.16 seconds to add new contact name and phone number to the address book on the Samsung Ace. This is extremely speedy, you can see from the chart below that it's more than eight seconds faster than average and beat out all of our comparison phones. In fact the only phone to come close was the Blackjack II from Samsung, which is very similar to the Ace. We were also quite pleased that this speedy time was achieved without the contacts application running in the background. If you leave it open you may find adding contacts even faster.
The most important factor in achieving this speed was that getting to a new contact interface was a two button press affair, from the home screen we just hit the right soft key to launch contacts and then the left soft key to open a new contact dialogue. Typing in the names and numbers with the QWERTY keyboard was also fairly quick. We are quite happy with the Ace's performance in this test. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
Looking/Sorting/Search (5.5)
Searching for contacts on the Samsung Ace is exceedingly simple, just start typing the contact's name, first or last, and the list of contacts will automatically be filtered. You don't even need to launch the contacts application if you just want to dial a number as typing on the home screen will bring up the dial screen and immediately begin sorting through your contacts based on phone number or name. You can also search by company name, but to do that you need to change the contact view in the application to By Company.
You can also filter your contacts by category, an important feature for anyone who has to manage thousands of contacts on their device. Contacts are sorted by last name, first name and there's no way to change this, unfortunately. Overall, however, we were quite pleased with the contact sorting and search options on the Samsung Ace.
Fields (8.2)
When you create a new contact on the Samsung Ace you have the typical plethora of fields available from Windows Mobile devices, a total of forty-one. Although this is plenty of fields for most and includes arcane options like Radio Phone and Cutomer ID we do wish it was more customizable as on Symbian Series 60 devices where you can create your own custom fields.
Speed Dial/Voice tags/Voice command (5.67)
The Ace ships with Microsoft's Voice Command software and it works rather well. Simply activate the software and then press and hold the send button to activate it. Speak a contact's name and the phone will ask you if you want to call that contact. It also works via Bluetooth and is able to handle a lot of other functions like announce messages and calendar appointments. We were most pleased that it was able to handle all five of our test contact names, which are fairly diverse and often cause voice command programs to choke. Voice tags, where you train the phone to learn a name, are not supported.
Speed dials are also supported on the Samsung Ace, although it will take a little bit of poking around to figure out how to assign them. You might think the Speed Dial program found in the Accessories folder is it, but you can't assign a speed dial from here. Instead you will need to go into your contacts, then open a particular contact and then choose the Add to Speed Dial option from the right soft key menu. Speed dials can be assigned to any number between two and ninety-nine, with one of course assigned to voice mail.
Adding Calendar Items (18.25)
The Samsung Ace took an average of 5.48 seconds to add a new calendar appointment for lunch the following day with a reminder fifteen minutes before. You can see from the chart below that this is an excellent score, much better than average and only beat out by one of our comparison phones. We found that we were helped out in this test by the fact that the time and reminder for our appointment were set in the defaults, so all we had to do was enter the title.
For different appointments it will take awhile longer, but it should still be fairly speedy, certainly it's never goint to take as long as the iPhone took. We found the fastest way to launch the calendar program was to scroll down a couple of plugins on the home screen and launching it from there. We were quite happy with the Ace's performance in this test, especially for a smart phone the ability to add PIM information quickly is quite important. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
Calendar Views (4.4)
Like other Windows Mobile Standard devices the Samsung Ace offers you three different views. The first is the Agenda view, which is actually a daily view as it only shows you the appointments for a single day. Here you see a list of appointments in chronological order with the title and time of the appointment. The best part of this view is the busy/free bar at the top of the screen that shows you what times of the day are blocked out by appointments.
The weekly view is a grid with hours on the left and days along the top with your appointments blocked out in the appropriate time. Moving left/right on the D-Pad will jump from appointment to appointment with information about the currently selected item displayed at the bottom of the screen. This is one of the better implementations of the week view that we've seen, especially compared to phones that don't show you any details about appointments in the weekly view.
Unfortunately the monthly view is less useful. Here you see the current month with indicators on days that have appointments That's about it, so it's really only useful to look up a date or quickly navigate to another day. We wonder why Microsoft didn't add a small indicator that shows you a list of appointments on the currently selected day as you have on Symbian Series 60 devices like the Nokia N82. Still, the daily and weekly views are excellent and between those two you should have no problem managing your calendar on the Samsung Ace.
Fields (10.0)
When you create a new appointment on the Ace you have a solid selection of fields to fill in. In addition to the basics like title, start/end time, and reminder you can also set busy status, location, notes, choose to make it an all-day event and set recurrence options. Recurrence is not as good as Windows Mobile Professional devices like the HTC Touch where you have almost complete control over the recurrence pattern. On the Ace and other Windows Mobile Standard devices you have to choose from relatively few recurrence options including weekly, monthly and yearly. We would have liked to see options for weekday and weekend recurrence as well. If you absolutely need to have more control over recurrence you can go out and get some third party software like Papyrus to get this capability. We also wish that support for categories was available. Aside from these niggles we were quite happy with the Ace's calendar fields.
Adding ToDo/Task (8.29)
It took us an average of 12.06 seconds to add a new task to the Samsung Ace. This is better than average and was the best time we saw amongst our comparison phones.
This despite the fact that the tasks program was buried in the menu system, so there was no quick shortct we could use from the home screen (note: we don't use the dynamically updated list of recently used programs on the Windows Mobile Standard home screen to conduct timing tests). We were quite happy with the Ace's performance in this test. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
ToDo/Task Sorting and Prioritizing (7.0)
Tasks on the Samsung Ace can be sorted by status, priority, subject, start or due date. You can also filter you tasks by category, recent tasks, active tasks and completed tasks. This should be more than enough functionality for people looking to manage their tasks on a mobile device.
Fields (8.0)
The tasks program on older versions of Windows Mobile standard provided you with almost no fields, all you could do is create a new task with a title. Thankfully newer devices like the Ace have many more fields, which makes the task program actually usable. Now, in addition to title, you can set priority, start/due date, set reminders, sensitivity, add a note, set category and recurrence. Recurrence is of the same limited variety we saw in the calendar application, so you can only have it recur weekly, monthly or yearly. The category support is actually a little surprising since this is missing from the calendar application, but we like it so we're not going to complain.
Adding Notes (4.43)
Windows Mobile Standard as found on the Samsung Ace doesn't ship with a text notes application by default, however Samsung has nicely added a third party application to the device. Using this we were able to create a new text note in an average of 11.28 seconds, which is faster than average and faster than any of our comparison devices aside from the BlackBerry Pearl 8130.
We were quite pleased with the speed we were able to manage in this test, especially because the notes program is buried in the menu system so we had to take time to go in and launch it. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
Note Interface (5.0)
The notes application on the Samsung Ace shows you a list of your notes when launched. The left soft key is assigned to create new notes while the right soft key opens a menu that allow syou to delete, send or sort your notes. The sort options are particularly nice as you can choose from sorting by name, date or size, either ascending or descending. We also like that you can take a note and send it via SMS or Email directly from the program. Search and categorization features would have been nice, but if you really need these you can go out and get a third party notes application. Overall we found the software interface to be solid, easy to use and with a good selection of options.
Note Formatting (0.0)
Unfortunately there are no formatting options when creating a note so you can't bold, italicize or underline text.
Voice Memo (4.0)
The voice memo application on the Samsung Ace is exceedingly simple. When launched you see a list of your notes, named Recording1, Recording2, etc. To record a new note simply hit the left soft key and it starts recording with no time limit. The right soft key opens a menu where you can delete notes, rename them or set them as a ringtone. It does the job, but certainly anyone who takes a lot of voice notes and needs more organization options will find it lacking.
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