Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 is a smartphone manufactured by Samsung that runs the Android operating system. Announced and released by Samsung in February 2012, the Galaxy Ace 2 is the successor to the Galaxy Ace Plus. Being a mid-range smartphone, Galaxy Ace 2 contains hardware between that of the Galaxy Ace Plus and Galaxy S Advance; it features a dual-core 800 MHz processor on the NovaThor U8500 chipset with the Mali-400 GPU. In May 2012, the device went on sale in the UK.
Hardware
Galaxy Ace 2 is a 3.5G mobile device that offers quad-band GSM, and was announced with dual-band 900/2100 MHz HSDPA at 14.4 Mbit/s downlink and 5.76 Mbit/s uplink speeds. The display is a 3.8-inch capacitive PLS TFT LCD touchscreen with 16M colours in a WVGA resolution. There is also a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and auto-focus, capable of recording videos at QVGA, VGA and HD resolutions. Galaxy Ace 2 also has a front-facing VGA camera. The device comes with a 1500 mAh Li-Ion battery.
Software
Galaxy Ace 2 comes with Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread and Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz 4.0 user interface. In September 2012, Samsung announced that Galaxy Ace 2 would be updated to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The phone can be upgraded to Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean. Galaxy Ace 2 has social network integration abilities and multimedia features. It is also preloaded with basic Google Apps, such as Google+ and Google Talk. The phone is available in Onyx Black and in White colours. The device also unofficially supports CyanogenMod as well as other AOSP-derived roms like AOKP. It also unofficially supports LineageOS.
Galaxy Ace 2x and in some markets Galaxy Trend are at first glance variants of Galaxy Ace 2, in that both have a similar shell and specifications; such as the slightly larger 4" screen, and similar specs for RAM and storage space. The major differentiator is in processing power: While Galaxy Ace 2 has a dual-core 800 MHz CPU, then Galaxy Ace II x and Galaxy Trend contain a single-core 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A5 processor in conjunction with an enhanced Adreno 200 GPU. The single-core SnapdragonS1MSM7227A ARMv7 SoC design is much closer to the one in Samsung Galaxy Mini 2. Galaxy Ace 2 x and Galaxy Trend have 645 MB of accessible RAM, and approximately 2 GB of user-accessible internal storage. Galaxy S Duos is available with very similar specifications; the primary differentiating feature is its dual-SIM support. Galaxy Trend Plus has very minor differences comparing with Galaxy Trend. Trend Plus has Android 4.2 Jelly Bean out of the box, single-core 1.2 GHz processor in conjunction with VideoCore 4 GPU and Broadcom BCM21664 SoC. Galaxy S Duos 2 is a dual-SIM equivalent of Galaxy Trend Plus.
Software
The devices are powered by Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, running Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz Nature UX as the default user interface. Where possible, the operating systems can be upgraded to somewhat newer official versions of Android 4.x than the factory install. To perform a firmware upgrade, the phones must have at least 1 GB of free internal storage. Since these phones run Android 4.0, they are still supported by cloud, communications and social networking services that push the latest versions of their apps, which have in some cases been designed with only the newest hardware in mind. Such applications hog system resources and cause the phones to run slowly. As a remedy, phone owners can replace those apps with less resource-hungry equivalents, or remove them entirely and use a web browser to access the services' sites. The Facebook app has been singled out as the one that uses the most resources overall; it can demonstrably consume between 206-231 MB of RAM memory, whereas Metal and Facebook Lite are much easier on phone RAM and battery life. Alternately, the Facebook mobile site can be used, as it uses browser notifications in browsers that support this functionality.
