Samsung’s new range of metal body phones can be found in all sizes. We recently reviewed the 4.5-inch A3 and the 5-inch A5 and were happy with them. The next in line had to be the 5.5-inch Galaxy A7. In terms of design, the phone looks exactly like its smaller variants and it has the same build. Under the hood though, it has an octa-core processor and a larger battery. The phone is priced around Rs. 30,500, for which it looks quite good and better than other phones in that price bracket.
Design and Build
The Samsung Galaxy A7 look nearly identical to the A5. It’s only larger, with a 5.5-inch screen. The unibody design has a metal build all over making it sturdy and look sophisticated. It’s slim design and the thin frame around the edges gives the A5 a premium look. Even with a 5.5-inch screen, the phone is pretty slim and weighs merely 141g. This makes the rather big-screen phone, quite comfortable to hold in one hand. That said, it’s still too big to reach every corner of the screen with one hand.
The back looks simple and has a sturdy feel. Unfortunately, like the A5, it is hard to grip. At its top, is the protruding camera lens, next to which are the flash and speaker. The screen has a thin bezel around it and the buttons at the front. It’s not a lot different than other Samsung phones, but it’s still one of the best looking ones.
Features
The 5.5-inch AMOLED screen runs a 1920x1080 resolution, translating to a pixel density of 401ppi, which results a sharp and vibrant display. This make the A5 perfect for watching full HD movies. The screen also has different modes that let you adjust the vibrancy to your preference.
The phone carries a decent set of hardware. It runs the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor, which bundles two individual quad-core chipsets clocked at 1.5GHz and 1GHz respectively. It’s powerful enough to let you run multiple apps flawlessly, and some heavy gaming. It’s tagged with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. You can also extend it up to 64GB with the help of a microSD card. The A7 is a dual-SIM card phone but one of the slots needs to be used as a microSD card slot if you want to expand the storage. The A7 features the same 13MP rear camera and 5MP front-facing camera as the A5. The app offer plenty of creative editing options to play around with. For example, the Shot and more mode lets you take multiple shots and then lets you select the best one out of them. You can also edit faces and erase all the moving objects from the photo to make it look its best. Besides those, you also have some of the basic modes such as Panorama, Continuous shot and HDR mode. The modes on the front-facing camera are designed to help you take great selfies. It also supports hand gestures and voice commands too.
The A7 is a dual-SIM phone and it supports 4G LTE. It also supports Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0. The A7 is powered by a 2600mAh battery, which Samsung claims can deliver up to 17 hours of talk time on a single charge. Based on our calculations, it should be good enough to last you a day on moderate use. Like other Samsung smartphones we’ve reviewed before, there are two battery saver modes. The Ultimate Power Saving mode cuts down on unnecessary background apps to give you that extra push till the time you can connect it to a charger.
Performance
We ran a couple of benchmarks on the A7 and got decent results. AnTuTu’s score of 31,311 is good enough to compete with some high-end smartphones. Other tests such as Linpack scored 513 MFLOPS, way above our expectations. The 5.5-inch screen has good clarity and deep blacks. However, colours look a little gaudy. You’ll easily be able to notice it while scrolling through the app drawer. Changing the screen mode helped a little, but the colours still looked overwhelming. The screen is bright enough to let you watch videos in broad daylight and viewing angles are good too.
The A7 make a good phone for gaming. Heavy games like Asphalt 8 run seamlessly on it. The phone did warm up a bit after five minutes of gaming, but it wasn’t enough to be of concern. The touchscreen is very responsive, a feature that’s seen while playing games such as Fruit Ninja and Subway Surfers. The rear camera captures great images. Although it takes some time to focus, the photos are sharp and colours look natural. The auto white balance holds up really well, even under heavy lighting. At close distances, the camera struggles to focus, but when it does, you get detailed macro shots. We noticed minor framing on the front camera. However, photos clicked on the front camera look good. The camera much like the one on the A5, does a great job of maintaining focus on all faces in the frame, even from a metre away. Images have noise, something you’ll notice when you zoom into images. Modes are fun to play with and you might actually find yourself using them pretty often. Voice commands failed to register most of the time we tried to click a photo.
Conclusion
Of the new metal series of phones from Samsung, we feel the A7 offers the best value for money. Sure, it could have been a little more powerful, but we’re still satisfied with its overall performance. You get a stylish, slim, lightweight metal body, which makes the Samsung Galaxy A7 a perfectly good device to own. If you want a big screen smartphone with a good multimedia experience, than the A7 is a good phone worth considering.
