Samsung Galaxy Ace review

The latest edition to the Galaxy family is the Samsung Galaxy Ace GT- S5830, which packs quite a punch considering its middle-of-the-road specification and £199.99 prepay/£25 contract price point.

The Android 2.2 (Froyo) operating system helps this smartphone stand tall next to other mid-range touchscreen devices, such as HTC's Wildfire, which comes with a noticeably slower processor and older version of Android, 2.1 (Eclair).

The Samsung Galaxy Ace is the little brother to the powerful Samsung Galaxy S in many ways.

Aesthetically, you'll be forced to play spot the difference if you put it up against the iPhone 4, and will come to the conclusion that the Samsung is generally smaller, lighter and nicer in the hand than the iPhone.

However, in terms of sex appeal, the iPhone 4 wins hands down for its sleek look and feel, since the Samsung Galaxy Ace is a bit too plasticky. Interestingly, although the Galaxy Ace is smaller, the screen size is exactly the same as the iPhone 4, at 3.5 inches.

The screen quality is a low-end TFT, and is poor compared to the Super AMOLED screen on the Samsung Galaxy S, which allows for crystal clear video playback.

There's no HD video recording, but the five-megapixel camera works well as a happy snapper – it has several shot and scene modes, which can be fun to play around with.

Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II dual-core CPU will run at 1.2 GHz

The Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II is a pretty powerful beast as it is with its Exynos chipset featuring a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU and Mali 400 GPU. However Samsung obviously decided 1GHz is not good enough for their flagship so they are adding even more oomph to it.

The company's Estonian office has just confirmed through their Facebook page that the two CPU cores will be running at 1.2 GHz, rather than the previously announced 1GHz. That update brings the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II to the top of the Cortex-A9 class, in pure computing power, at least.

It's a surprising move, we admit. We've never seen processor specs jump midway from announcement to release but that's obviously the case, The Galaxy S II official microsite no longer lists the exact technical specs of the CPU, so we can only assume something's cooking there for real.

Update: We just got a further confirmation from an internal source that the Galaxy S II CPU has indeed been updated to 1.2GHz.

What we don't know yet is how this new chip compares to the new Qualcomm Snapdragons, featuring 1.4 GHz dual-core Scorpion CPUs. We guess we'll see about that in a couple of months time when the Galaxy S II and the HTC EVO 3D will both be finalized.

It should be pretty obvious by now that 2011 is going to be as good a year for Android fans as 2010.