Another day, another new Samsung Android phone has been made official, and this time it’s the turn of the Galaxy Ace 3. A sequel to the, well, Galaxy Ace 2, this is one of Samsung’s bread-and-butter phones – a high selling, entry-level smartphone for those who don’t care about/can’t stretch to the Galaxy S4. While the 3G version will almost certainly continue to sell well around the world, Samsung has also added a 4G LTE version, and subtly boosted its specs.
Design-wise, if you weren’t all that enthused about the Galaxy S4 Mini, which was announced last week, then the Galaxy Ace 3 won’t set your heart rate racing either. It looks like most other Samsung smartphones, with a flattened top and bottom, curved corners and a top-center camera lens on the rear. It’s not all that different to the Galaxy Ace 2, but there are definite shades of the Galaxy S4 in there too. Flip the phone over and you’ll see the lens to the 5-megapixel camera, flanked by an LED flash and the phone’s speaker.
The screen measures 4-inches and has a 480 x 800 pixel resolution, which is identical to the Galaxy Ace 2 aside from a tiny 0.2-inch increase in the size of the display. The Ace 3 runs Android 4.2, and absolutely no one will be surprised to learn Samsung has added a few of its own apps to the TouchWiz UI, including Smart Stay, S Voice, S Translator and Easy Mode, to help newcomers with the transition from a non-smartphone to the Ace 3. Other features include GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi Direct, and a digital compass.
The differences between the 4G LTE and 3G versions are all internal. The 4G Galaxy Ace 3 has a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 8GB of internal storage, and a powerful 1800mAh battery. The 3G version has to make do with a 1GHz, dual-core chip – which is still up from the 800MHz dual-core in the Ace 2 – and there’s 4GB of internal memory, of which just 1.77GB is available to use, plus a 1500mAh battery. Both have a microSD card slot ready to provide an extra 64GB of storage, and a dual-SIM variant of the 3G Ace 3 will also be produced. As with many other new Samsung phones, no information on the release date or the price has been shared; however we expect to learn more during its June 20 event.
