Samsung Galaxy J7 Pro First Impressions

Samsung has upgraded its one of the most famous J series with the addition of Galaxy J7 Pro and Galaxy 7 Max smartphones in India. The Galaxy J7 Max comes with a price tag of Rs 17,900, while the Galaxy J7 Pro is priced at Rs 20,900 and both of them will be available for purchase from retail stores.

Samsung Galaxy J7 Pro will be available from mid-July and will compete in a price segment, where the competition is really intense. On one side, you get Motorola Moto G5 Plus and some smartphones from Lenovo in the online domain, while on the other, the phone will face a competition with the likes of Honor 8 Lite, Gionee A1 etc in the offline channel. So, the latest Galaxy J7 Pro will be able to compete with the others or will simply bow down to the competition? We spent some time with the device during the event and here is what we think about the new Galaxy J7 Pro.

The mid-range segment has seen a lot premium looking smartphones and Galaxy J7 Pro is the newest addition to it. The smartphone does give a premium look, especially, the black colour variant. But what makes the device stand out of the crowd is the design of the Antenna bands at the top and bottom of the rear panel coupled with the flushed camera module, which is surely a head turner, though the front of the device resembles strongly with Samsung’s last year flagship device, the Galaxy S7.

At the front, you find a 5.5-inch screen with minimal side bezels along with a home button which is flanked by back and recent buttons at the base, while at the top there is a secondary camera along with an earpiece and front flash. At the right, there is a power on/off button and one will find a bizarrely-placed speaker grille just above it. The left houses volume controls, Dual-SIM tray and a dedicated micro SD card slot.The top is bare, while at the base, there is a Headphone jack coupled with USB Type-C port. Overall, the smartphone does gives a premium look.

On the display front, you get a 5.5-inch Full HD Super AMOLED Display with a screen Resolution of 1280 x 1920 pixels. During our brief testing period, we found out that the display has good viewing angles and colours were quite punchy and crispy in nature. However, it would be interesting to see how well it will perform during our review period.

On the hardware front, it is powered by a 1.6GHz octa-core Exynos 7870 Processor along with Mali T830 GPU. The phone is backed by a 3GB RAM and 64GB of internal storage, which can be further expandable up to 256GB via a micro SD card. The company’s in-house processor is comparable with Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 Chipset and the former is also present in the recently-launched Galaxy J7 Prime (priced at Rs 15,990). Looking at the sheer specs sheet, the smartphone will face a stiff competition with the likes of Honor 8 Lite, Gionee A1, Vivo V5s and Oppo F3, which are available in the offline market.

On the software front, the phone runs on latest Android 7.0 Nougat. Interestingly, the brand has renamed its user interface and it is now known as Samsung Experience (8.1). The latest user interface is similar to what we have seen in the latest Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. However, I still feel that the UI is flooded with many bloatware, which has been a problem with Samsung’s UI. We will be talking about this in detail in our review. So, stay tuned.

On the camera front, the device boasts a 13-megapixel front and rear cameras with flash. The back one has an Aperture of f/1.7, while the front has an aperture of f/1.9. The camera UI is pretty clean and swiping right will open all the filters, while if you swipe left one will come across different modes which includes Pro, Panorama, Continous shot, HDR, Night, Sports, Sound and shot. Lastly, it also features Social Camera, which allows users to quickly share photos to Facebook or on WhatsApp within the camera app, an interesting feature indeed. However, we would highly recommend you to wait for a detailed camera test to analyse the camera capabilities of Galaxy J7 Pro.

The Galaxy J7 Pro packs a 3600mAh battery, which could easily make through the day, however, we will come with a detailed review of the battery performance of the device. For connectivity, it supports 4G LTE, Bluetooth, NFC, WiFi and all the basic connectivity functions.