Samsung Ace Cell Phone Review - Value & Comparisons
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Alfredo Padilla Published on April 29, 2008 Comment on this |
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Value (4.0)
At $199.99 with a two-year contract and after a $100 mail-in rebate the Ace is priced a little too high for our tastes. The Blackjack II, which is a slightly superior but otherwise very similar handset, can be had from AT&T for half the price. If you have a choice of carrier you're better off going with that device and on Sprint you should strongly consider the Palm Centro, which has many of the same features of the Ace at half the price. As with any cell phone you can expect the price to drop within a matter of a few months and we recommend waiting for it to drop before you purchase the Ace.
BlackBerry Pearl 8130 - The Pearl packs many of the Ace's features into a smaller form factor and has the easier to learn BlackBerry OS to boot. Both are powerful smart phones but we have to say we lean towards the Pearl in this matchup, especially when you consider that the Pearl is half the price of the Ace.
Nokia N82 - As an unlocked device the Nokia N82 is going to cost you quite a bit more than the Ace and you'll have to use it on a GSM carrier like AT&T or T-Mobile. The N82 is also a smart phone with many of the same organizer features that the Ace sports, but it runs Symbian Series 60 instead of Windows Mobile. The area where the Ace wins over the N82 is with the QWERTY keyboard. For heavy texters this will be a big consideration given the N82's rather small and fiddly keypad. For those who want a multimedia device, however, the N82 beats out the Ace with one of the best cameras we've seen on a cell phone plus excellent video capture.
Apple iPhone - The iPhone is a superior multimedia device to the Ace due to its 8 or 16 GB of storage and excellent music and video playback functionality. It's camera is also better than the Ace's. For those who need to live in an Exchange business environment or who type out a lot of emails, however, we have to lean towards the Ace with it's QWERTY keyboard and Windows Mobile software. This may change in the near future when the iPhone gets an update to enable Exchange support, but for now the Ace is probably the better choice for business users.
Samsung Blackjack II - Both of these devices were based on the very popular Blackjack phone and as such they are very similar. The Blackjack II sports a two megapixel camera compared to the Ace's 1.3 megapixel camera, but both did pretty poorly in our tests. Both run Windows Mobile 6, which means both sport solid messaging and organizer features. We liked the keyboard on the Blackjack II a little better than the Ace, but our words per minute test didn't show much of a difference. The big difference between the two is in battery life with the Blackjack II putting up a much better talk time score, but the Ace beating it out on music playback time. The other difference, of course, is carrier with the Ace only available from Sprint and the Blackjack II exclusive to AT&T.
HTC Touch - The touch is a Windows Mobile Professional device, which means it sports a touch screen while in contrast the Ace does not. That touch screen is used for almost all the interactions with the Touch, as befits its name, with mostlly negative results. In particular we found typing on the Touch's on screen keyboard to be slow and difficult, a sharp contrast to the Ace's fast QWERTY keyboard. The Touch's camera performed marginally better than the Ace, which isn't saying much, and aside from the minor differences between Windows Mobile Professional versus Windows Mobile Standard you're going to get pretty much the same software capabilities. We'd lean towards the Ace here just because we like a phone that allows you to message easily.
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