We already knew Samsung has the next generation of the Ace lineup in the pipeline and today we get a leak of a nicely looking official image.

Samsung's Galaxy Ace line has always offered an excellent price-to-quality ratio. While all the people drooled after the high-end Samsung Galaxy S3 last year, most of them ended up buying either an Ace 2 or a Galaxy S3 Mini. They visually resembled the flagship, but came with a balanced feature set and a price tag that's much easier to swallow. But we digress.

Back to the new photo, the frontal pic of the Ace 3 looks rather generic, or even boring. That's hardly a surprise though, as the same thing holds true for most Galaxy smartphones after the Galaxy S2 generation. Samsung wouldn't risk experimenting with the design of a mass-market smartphone such as the Ace 3. Any future change would have to be introduced by the trend-setting Galaxy S line, so we expect no change in design before the eventual announcement of a Galaxy S5 phone next year.

We already knew the specs of the Galaxy Ace 3 from another leak last month, but it's nice to finally put a face to the name.

Specs-wise, we expect from the Galaxy Ace 3 to feature a 4-inch LCD with WVGA resolution, a 1GHz dual-core processor with 1 GB of RAM, a 5 megapixel rear camera, and a 1,500mAh battery. As you see, not much will be changed compared to the Ace 2, except the screen size and, probably, the newer version of Android that should be on board.

Curiously, the model number of the Galaxy Ace 3 S7270 is actually lower than the one of the Ace 2 I8160 and it's not even under the same portfolio category, as evident from the change of the letter designation.

Rumors claim the price of the Galaxy Ace 3 should be around US$300, which would actually make it substantially more expensive than the current Ace 2, which runs for about 2/3 of that amount.

Anyway, the Galaxy Ace 3 should be announced quite soon, as according to further leaked info, the Ace 3 should become available in July.