Segmentation is at its finest in the Samsung smartphone lineup. That's how we have the entire alphabet of series with a handful of models in each of them. Near the bottom of the food chain - which is in no way sorted alphabetically - the hugely successful J series is the place to get good value for money, and the Galaxy J5 (2017) is ready to oblige.







At 5.2 inches of screen diagonal, the Galaxy J5 (2017) fits between the 5-inch J3 (2017) and the 5.5-inch J7 (2017). From then on it takes some careful balancing between those two extremes to assemble a J5 that is that much better than the J3 without being as good as the J7. Perhaps most importantly, the J5 for this year gets the Exynos 7870 SoC - a proper 14nm chip with an octa-core CPU, as opposed to the quad-core Snapdragon 410 that powers the J5 (2016).



With only the J7 treated to full-HD, the J5 has a 720p screen - which is acceptable considering the smaller diagonal. Plus, the J7 (2016)'s sales figures didn't seem to be hur…