Samsung is finally making progress with its metal-clad design smartphones and announced its flagship for the Galaxy A series, the Galaxy A7. It comes with a sleek looking design and, of course, a full metal body finish just like the A5 and the A3, which were announced earlier. Samsung put the biggest brother of the A-series on display at its annual South West Asia Forum in Bangkok and we took a look at the slick looking smartphone...
The Galaxy A7 is the slimmest smartphone from the company which is just 6.3 mm thick. This is quite impressive as it is also quite light (141gms) considering the large size of the smartphone. In the hardware department, it runs on a Snapdragon 615 octa-core chip with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of expandable memory. It runs on Android 4.4.4 Kitkat with the latest TouchWiz UI with theme support. Samsung has said that the smartphone will be updated to Android Lollipop soon.
Samsung has (obviously) used its Super AMOLED display technology which has always been impressive in terms of contrast and colour reproduction (especially blacks). With a 5.5-inch display size and full HD (1920x1080) resolution you get a pixel density of 401ppi which makes it look sharp and crisp.
At the back there is a 13MP camera with an LED flash with the lens slightly raised from the main body. In the short time we had to check out the device, the camera felt fast and responsive and the pictures looked quite good if not great. There is also the loudspeaker next to the camera with a nice chromed up grill, just like on the A5 and the A3.
The bezels are fairly slim and you get a 72% screen to body ratio which has helped Samsung to make it slightly smaller than what you would expect from a 5.5-inch device. Like all Samsung mid to high range devices, you get a hardware home key with two capacitive keys on either side.
With the introduction of the A-series, Samsung has moved the location of the 3.5mm audio jack to the bottom, right next to the microUSB port. This is the same treatment that Apple has given to the new and the last generation of its iPhones. Coincidence?
Since the device is quite large, the top has been kept empty and unlike last year's metal-clad smartphones, the radio antennas are very small and quite discrete.
At the front there is a chromed up earpiece and the 5MP front camera next to it. The front camera comes with 'Ultra Wide Shot' and 'Auto Selfie' features that were first seen on the Galaxy Note 4. If you like taking selfies, then these two features will impress you.
Apart from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, the A7 comes with NFC, dual SIM capability and 4G LTE connectivity making it future proof. There is also a memory expansion slot which supports microSD cards upto 64GB, allowing you to carry around a large music library.
Available for about Rs. 30,000, the Galaxy A7 has not been priced well, but overall we like the smartphone and we think a lighter price-tag could make this a hot seller.