Samsung Galaxy / Education / [DB] NEW-ACE KOR-ENG DICTIONARY
REVIEW
NEW-ACE KOR-ENG is the school-desk Korean dictionary, ported faithfully to Galaxy.
Geumseong's New-Ace bilingual dictionary — the one Korean students grew up consulting in print — packaged as a Diotek lookup app for Samsung devices. Authoritative, narrow in scope, and exactly what its audience wants.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
[DB] NEW-ACE KOR-ENG Dictionary
SELVAS AI INC.
OUR SCORE
7.4
SAMSUNG GALAXY
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
The Korean reference-publishing world has a short list of trusted bilingual dictionary brands, and Geumseong’s New-Ace sits firmly on it. Generations of Korean students learned English with a New-Ace volume on the desk; the app version, built by Diotek and distributed only through the Samsung Galaxy Store, is the same content delivered in the place a phone-first learner actually opens.
That sourcing is what separates this app from the dozens of free Korean-English lookups that scrape the same handful of open dictionaries and call it a product. NEW-ACE ships with an edited, attributed lexicon — definitions, example sentences, idioms — produced by a publisher whose name on a print spine is its own credential. The app is a thin wrapper around that data, and the wrapper is the right shape: fast incremental search, clean bidirectional lookup, persistent bookmarks, no network dependency once installed.
It reads like a textbook publisher’s reference, not a translation app, and that distinction is the whole product. A learner who needs a confident answer to “what does this particle actually do in this clause” gets one; a tourist who needs to know how to order coffee should keep using Papago.
It reads like a textbook publisher's reference, not a translation app, and that distinction is the whole product.
FEATURES
NEW-ACE KOR-ENG is a Diotek-built front end onto the Geumseong (Kumsung) New-Ace Korean-English dictionary — a print reference well-known in Korean classrooms, here rendered as a Galaxy Store lookup app. Type a Korean headword or an English gloss, get a structured entry: pronunciation, part of speech, numbered senses, idioms, and example sentences drawn from the source dictionary's editorial content.
The lookup behaves the way a bilingual reference should: incremental search narrows the headword list as you type, bidirectional queries flip between Korean-first and English-first without a mode toggle, and tapping a cross-referenced term opens its full entry rather than dumping you back to a search box. History and bookmarks persist across sessions. Audio pronunciation, where the entry carries it, is canned rather than synthesised, which is preferable for a learner who wants the right vowel length on the first listen.
Distribution is the Samsung wrinkle. The app is a free Galaxy Store download tied to Samsung accounts, with no Play Store equivalent at the same SKU. There is no premium tier, no ads, and no telemetry hook visible in normal use — the lexical data ships with the install and the app works offline once provisioned.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The pedigree is the point. NEW-ACE is one of the standard Korean educational publishing brands, and Diotek has spent two decades porting reference dictionaries onto phones for Samsung, so the lookup feels like a textbook publisher's reference rather than a translation app. Entries are edited, not scraped; example sentences are grammatical Korean, not back-translated English; and the part-of-speech tagging is consistent across the dictionary in a way machine-translated apps cannot match.
The offline-first posture also matters for the target audience. A student in a Seoul classroom or a heritage learner on a commuter train wants the lookup to resolve in under a second without a network round-trip, and this one does.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The interface shows its age. Typography is dense, the layout is closer to a 2018 Samsung reference app than a 2026 one, and there is no dark mode worth using. Search is exact-match-leaning — a typo or an unfamiliar romanisation will return nothing rather than a fuzzy suggestion, which is the wrong default for the learners who most need a dictionary.
The Galaxy Store exclusivity is also a real cost. A learner who switches to a Pixel or who studies on a non-Samsung tablet loses access entirely, and there is no cloud-synced bookmark export to soften the transition. For a reference book that lives or dies on continuity of study, that is a meaningful cap on who should commit to it.
CONCLUSION
Install it if you are a Galaxy owner studying Korean seriously, or a Korean speaker who wants a published bilingual reference rather than a translation engine. The lexicon is the draw — the chrome around it is merely adequate. Watch for whether Diotek refreshes the UI for One UI 7; if they don't, expect the long tail of learners to drift to Naver Dictionary on the web instead.