Samsung Galaxy Ace Duos Review

The original Samsung Galaxy Ace was quite a popular phone, even though it wasn’t the best in the milky way. Now, Samsung has brought its cousin brother out for the Indian market. The Galaxy Ace Duos sports a dual SIM slot and comes with a 3 MP camera (the original had a 5 MP camera with LED flash) without LED flash. With these ‘features’, does the Galaxy Ace Duos justify its price tag? Let’s find out. 

The Duos

Design and Build Quality

There’s not much that has changed here – this phone has the exact same looks as the Ace with the addition of an extra button for dual SIM configuration. The same 3.5-inch screen has been retained with a pixel resolution of 320 x 480. The look and the feel is exactly like the S5830, so if you want more fodder in this section, you can head over to our Galaxy Ace review. 

Looks the same as the original Ace

Features and Performance

Interface

With the addition of a second SIM card slot you get more icons on the top of your screen and some more settings in the connectivity options. But still the phone is powered by the same 800 MHz processor with 158 MB of internal storage and 278 MB RAM. It’s got Samsung’s TouchWiz UI onboard and is sadly one of the slower phones in the market at this price range. Not too impressive on the spec front, either, but in terms of plain usage, with time, the phone tends to get frustratingly slow making multitasking an absolute no brainer. 

We put it through a few synthetic benchmark tests as well and here are the results. In AnTuTu, the Duos got a score of 1626 points, which puts it well below the HTC Explorer, but above the LG Optimus Net – two phones that are much cheaper than this one. In Linpack, we got a single thread score of 9.49 points and a multi thread score of 8.418 points. 

Benchmarks

Media

The one thing we really loved about the Duos was the media department. The same interface look that we saw on the Wave Y Young is present on the Duos as well. Custom enhancements, 5.1 channel sound and a good pair of in-ear headphones means that you’ll be rocking to the tunes. Format support is limited, just like the original Ace, but you have third party apps to counter that problem. The Ace Duos was unable to play 720p videos, but that’s a limitation you’ll have to live with. 

Media interface

Connectivity

Here’s where the Galaxy Ace Duos stands out from the other Androids in the market. Err, did we just say stand out? This section more or less exposes the shortcomings of the Duos. Firstly, it’s got dual SIM card support, which means you can slot in a primary CDMA card and a secondary GSM or CDMA card slot.