Here we are with the Samsung Galaxy A7. After years of complaining by us, Samsung listened and with the Galaxy S6 they finally abandoned the chrome sides and the plastic back design in favor of a more industrial metal build with glass on the back. This new design felt exquisite and premium and it was praised by the tech community. It’s no surprise that with their new line up of 2016 devices Samsung is carrying on the same design. If you are someone who loves the S6 and the S7 but can’t afford it, Samsung released the Galaxy A series specifically for that democratic. We will be taking an in depth look at the Samsung Galaxy A7 which has a similar design and the same build quality as the Galaxy S7 but costs considerably less than the Galaxy S7. Here is our In-depth look at Samsung Galaxy A7.

The design and build quality is an aspect of phones where either I get really annoyed or I start praising it, even the tiniest details can make me start disliking the device which is why I disliked so many of Samsung devices in the past. Your phone is the thing you will be seeing the most in your day and I think if we are spending so much time on our phone the phone better be beautiful to look at. The Samsung Galaxy A7 is definitely a beautiful device.

I love holding this device, just the way it feels in the hand is delightful. The chamfered metal on the side and the glass on the back feels so premium. A big step up from what they were doing before with chrome sides and plastic back. If you are someone like me who was skipping on Samsung devices just because of their build quality, you might want to take a look at this and see how great it looks and feels. Everything about the build is high quality. The power button on the right side is not recessed and has a lot of travel same with the volume buttons on the left. The top side has a sim-card tray which fits seamlessly with the rest of the body. On the bottom side we have a speaker grill, a charging port and a headphone jack. The back side of the phone is also glass even though it looks really good and feels really great, the glass can be vulnerable, slippery and it’s a fingerprint magnet. I usually don’t drop phones that much so this is not a big issue for me but if you drop your phone all the time you should consider buying a case or putting a skin on top.

The front side of the phone is slightly tapered at the edges it’s just a small detail but I love it when manufactures take their time and put these little details in the phone. Also the phone has little bezels on the side and they are practically unnoticeable in black color. The power button is also a finger print sensor and there are two traditional Samsung capacitive buttons on the side.

Over all I love the design of this phone and I’m very nitpicky about this aspect. If you are having doubts about the design let me clear them. It’s a fantastic build. The Samsung Galaxy A7 gets 4.5 out of 5 stars from us in design and build quality.

The Samsung Galaxy A7 has a 5.5-inch 1080p panel with 401 pixels per inch density. With Samsung you expect a very saturated, high quality super AMOLED panel because they have taken years to perfect this technology the A7 is no exception. It’s that exact same panel on all high-end Samsung devices and it does its job well. The blacks are pitch black since those pixels aren’t being lit and photos and videos pop more than a regular IPS panel because AMOLED tends to be more saturated and vibrant than IPS displays.

One thing which I have to give props to Samsung for is that even though it’s comparatively large 5.5-inch panel they still managed to keep the phone compact. This is impressive work it doesn’t feel that big in the hand and doesn’t look awkward when you are taking calls. Impressive work Samsung. 4.5 stars out of 5 for Display.

Performance

Till now everything I have mentioned about the Samsung Galaxy A7 has been positive but every phone has some negative aspects some phones have more negatives than positive and some have small minor issues. This device falls on to the latter. An amazing device with some minor issues and these issues can be easily ironed out.

Let’s talk about the performance first. On paper the Samsung Galaxy A7 seems like a solid device. A Snapdragon 615 processor with 3GB of RAM and in reality yes it’s a good performer. App opening speed is rapid and there isn’t much lag once you’re in an app but this performance could have been slightly better if the operating system wasn’t so heavy. Overall the performance gets 4 out of 5 stars.

Operating System

With a phone with 3GB RAM you might be thinking “how can someone fill that much RAM?” well the skin they have put on top Touchwiz in idle takes 1.5GB of RAM. That’s half the RAM. That’s the main issue I have with the device that touchwiz is needlessly heavy. We don’t need all these software “optimizations” we just need a basic good looking operating system which does its job without all these bells and whistles.

Unfortunately, that’s not the only issue I have with Touchwiz. Touchwiz is not designed well, in an era of modern material design touchwiz is still years behind. Once you put in a symbol for something you don’t need text right in front of it explaining that same thing. Take a look at the status bar you have the battery indicator and right next to the indicator you also have battery percent written in text explaining that same thing. That’s two things doing the same thing at the same time right next to each other taking unnecessary space. The entire OS is filled with little things like this. These things are making touchwiz so bad to use. They want to overly simplify things but Samsung has to take a different approach.

One good thing about AMOLED displays is that the black pixels are turned off that saves battery and looks better and Samsung knew this that’s why their OS was mostly black before but now for some reason they switched to entirely white backgrounds. What’s the point of AMOLED if your entire OS is white? Usually now I would give a counter point and say something that’s good about touchwiz to keep the overall tone of the article positive but I have nothing good to say about touchwiz. The icons are ugly the design is all over the place and the whole thing is needlessly heavy.

It’s really a shame to see a device with such great hardware and such great build quality having such a terrible software. Touchwiz only gets 2.5 stars out of 5.

The Samsung Galaxy A7 also features a finger print sensor, it’s a nice addition to the phone and it’s usually accurate. However sometimes it can be really annoying. Once it doesn’t respond to your finger it won’t recognize it the next time either and on the third time if you are lucky it will recognize your finger print if not you will have to enter an 8 characters long password with one number and one capital letter. All this just to unlock your device. Maybe this is just a software issue that could be fixed with the Marshmallow update (because Android 6.0 has native fingerprint sensor support) or maybe the finger print sensor is just not that good.

Let me quote Paul Rudd and say:

80 percent of the time. It works everytime. The finger print sensor of the Samsung Galaxy A7 gets 3 stars out of 5. Editor’s note.

Ok those last three paragraphs were really negative about the phone but in real world and day to day use these things won’t bother you that much and once you get used to them they won’t be as big of a problem as I am saying they are. I assure you, you will have a great time with this device because it is a remarkable device.

The Samsung Galaxy A7 has a 13-megapixel camera sensor with optical image stabilization. Optical Image Stabilization is one of those things that you are not sure if you need until you have it. It’s a great camera the pictures it took in my experience were sharp and really great for Facebook and Instagram. It does its job well and the camera app has plenty of options so you can tweak it until you get the photo you desire.

The front camera is also really good, 5-megapixel and just a 24 mm lens. This is a good thing it means you are able to take wider photos from the front cam like if you have a lot of friends trying to get in photo you won’t have a problem. The camera gets 4 out of 5 stars.

Battery

The phone has a 3300 mAh Battery and because the phone has an AMOLED panel and it’s 1080p instead of 2K the battery performance results are really good. One and a half day on somewhat heavy use and over 5 hours of screen on time. Any phone with 5+ hours of screen on time is what I consider to be a good battery. The battery of the Samsung Galaxy A7 is really amazing, it gets 4.5 stars out of 5.

The Verdict on the Samsung Galaxy A7

The Samsung Galaxy A7 is a remarkable device. It checks out most of the boxes with its great camera, great battery life, great display, great performance and really really amazing build quality. However, on the software side things require a lot of work and improvement, touchwiz is the only thing pushing down a device which is overall a solid package. This is the case with most Samsung devices. In the end of the day I loved using this device and I would have no problem with using this device as my daily driver as I said before if you love the Samsung galaxy S6 or the S7 but you can’t afford it this is a great alternative and if you root it and edit the build.prop to make it say Galaxy S6 in phone status you can fool a lot of people into thinking that this is the S6. Overall this is a fantastic device I recommend it.

This was our review of the Samsung Galaxy A7. What did you think guys? And how has your experience been with this device? If you liked this article, please share it with your friends because that really helps us and please like us on facebook to stay up to date with our latest content. Thank you for reading.