The Galaxy J5 (2016) and Galaxy J7 (2016) marked Samsung’s first foray into making budget smartphones with premium builds, a move that was becoming increasingly necessary for the company to compete with the affordable yet premium smartphones from Chinese manufacturers. Like it did for its flagships with the Galaxy Alpha and then the Galaxy Note 4, Samsung started out small, with the new J5 and J7 keeping the removable battery and plastic back while getting a metal makeover on the sides. With the Galaxy J5 Prime and Galaxy J7 Prime, the Korean giant gave its budget lineup its first truly premium treatment.
There’s no removable battery on the J5 and J7 Prime thanks to their all-metal bodies, and while that alone might make for a big refresh to Samsung’s affordable smartphone lineup, the company has also made other changes. The J5 Prime and J7 Prime get fingerprint sensors on the front, and they also introduce a notification light to the galaxy (pun intended) of sub-$300 Samsung smartphones.
But while these are all interesting additions, they have also affected the retail price of these handsets. The Galaxy J7 Prime, which we had the chance to review, is priced at Rs. 18,990 (roughly $285) in the Indian market. At that price, you can buy phones with the Snapdragon 820 processor and other high-end specs from Chinese brands, which means Samsung continues to battle it out mainly with its brand value and the fact that its smartphones are available from every brick and mortar as well as online store.
Does the Galaxy J7 Prime offer enough to justify a price that gets you flagship-grade phones in some markets? Let’s find out in our official review.
Design
The metal unibody on the Galaxy J7 Prime gives the device the premium look and feel one would expect, although the phone keeps the same overall design that we have been seeing on Samsung smartphones for a few years now. A closer inspection reveals an important difference, though – Samsung has changed the location of the loudspeaker from the back of the device to the right side, above the power button. It’s a welcome move; the loudspeaker still directs sound away from you, but it’s better than having it at the back where sound can easily be muffled depending on what surface the phone is lying on.
Samsung makes a point to note that the Galaxy J7 Prime’s camera module sits flush with the rest of the body, a design element that doesn’t negatively affect the phone’s thickness. Again, all that metal means the phone feels nice to hold, although the metal also means the J7 Prime is quite slippery. Also, the back isn’t all metal – the top and bottom parts are made of plastic to help the antennas work better, but you will never notice this plastic in regular usage. The microSD and SIM slots are accessed from the left side, with a pin required to take the trays out. Yes, this inconvenience has finally found its way to Samsung’s low-end lineup, in addition to the lack of a user-replaceable battery.
But the Galaxy J7 Prime is a well-built phone, with the only downside being the rather cheap tactile feedback of the volume and power buttons (the volume buttons are also placed a bit too high for my liking). The premium design is not something Samsung can be proud of in this day and age, as considerably cheaper phones from Chinese manufacturers come with equally premium designs, but it is good to see the company finally taking a step towards the same for its affordable devices.
Display
Since the Galaxy J7 Prime falls in the budget category, that premium design had to mean Samsung made sacrifices elsewhere, and the sacrifice is most apparent when you look at the phone’s display. Gone is the Super AMOLED display that adorned the first two Galaxy J series and in its place is a regular LCD panel. The resolution has gotten a boost to Full HD, which means the display offers a sharp viewing experience, but the LCD panel simply cannot match the beauty of a Super AMOLED display.
The J7 Prime’s display has vivid colors for an LCD display, but they do not compare to the eye-popping contrast offered by an AMOLED panel. The same goes for the brightness levels, although the display can hurt your eyes if you turn the brightness all the way up indoors. Speaking of brightness, there’s bad news – the Galaxy J7 Prime is yet another budget Samsung phone without an ambient light sensor, which means there is no auto brightness option. An Outdoors mode offers a workaround for those bright and sunny days, but at this point it is simply getting ridiculous that Samsung is putting out phones without such a basic feature.
We thankfully have a notification LED this time around, and the one on the J7 Prime can show a range of different colors. The LED is bright and easily noticeable at night, although outdoors it can be slightly hard to see based on how intense the sun is or how much light is around you.
Camera
The Galaxy J7 Prime features a 13-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera, and both cameras fail to impress when it comes to image quality. The selfie camera is the bigger disappointment; you would expect an 8-megapixel sensor to capture a notable amount of detail, but images taken by the J7 Prime’s front camera come out extremely soft and washed out, even on a bright and sunny day (see the selfie sample below to know what I mean). The photo quality is no different or better than the 5-megapixel cameras that have adorned other budget Galaxy phones. Samsung should have used the resources spent on the higher-resolution sensor in other areas (like putting in an auto brightness sensor).
The rear camera is by no means bad – photos taken in ample light come out noise-free and with good detail. In fact, the J7 Prime manages to capture more detail than the Galaxy A9 Pro’s primary camera, despite costing almost half as much. But you can only zoom in so much before the detail goes away and softness creeps in. The camera also tends to falter with areas in shadow; HDR mode helps in such scenarios, but since you have to manually switch to HDR mode, it becomes an inconvenience. Low-light performance is commendable when there are a lot of artificial lights around, but unsurprisingly the phone is unable to do much in extremely low-light situations.
The camera app on the Galaxy J7 Prime can be launched with a double press of the home button, and its user interface is similar to the camera app on other Samsung devices. You get the usual customization options of filters, photo resolution, flash and timer, and a few different shooting modes, including Night, Pro, HDR, Panorama and Beauty mode. As with all of Samsung’s non-flagship phones, the Pro mode only offers basic controls – you can change exposure, ISO values and white balance, but you don’t get options for shutter speed control or shooting images in RAW.
Software
Samsung has been a bit cheeky when it comes to the software on the Galaxy J7 Prime (and the Galaxy J5 Prime as well, I presume). You see, the J7 Prime runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with the same user interface found on pre-Galaxy Note 7 devices, but Samsung has built in a few features that were introduced on its now discontinued sixth-generation Note flagship. The J7 Prime comes loaded with Samsung Cloud, new Gallery app (both of which are also available for the Galaxy S7 lineup through a software update) and the new Samsung Notes app, which integrates all of the company’s note-taking and drawing apps into one.
The J Prime series also gets the exclusive S Secure feature. S Secure is an extension of Samsung’s KNOX security solution and allows you to lock apps, files and other data behind a password (or fingerprint) and also enable safer browsing on a Wi-Fi connection. Locking and hiding apps does what any of the app locking apps on the Play Store do – you can enable the lock for apps of your choosing, which will make the phone ask for your password every time you open these apps.
Secure Folder, also found on the Note 7, is where things get interesting. If you have used Samsung’s KNOX feature on any other Samsung phone, you will be familiar with what Secure Folder does. For those who haven’t, this feature basically creates a secure virtual environment inside your phone where your chosen apps can reside with data that cannot be accessed outside Secure Folder. It’s a way of creating two different user accounts on the device, with everything inside Secure Folder working independently of the regular content on the phone.
What advantage does it give you? Well, for one, you can actually have two different WhatsApp accounts active on your phone thanks to Secure Folder, and the same goes for many other apps that you might not otherwise let you have two accounts on the same device. You can also keep media files you don’t want anyone else to see locked inside, or create a different profile for a game in case you share your phone with your kid or a friend/family member. Samsung doesn’t offer multi-user support on its smartphones, but Secure Folder certainly acts as a nice alternative, one that is much more secure thanks to Samsung’s KNOX security solution.
Then there’s Secure Wi-Fi. As the name suggests, it offers increased security when you’re browsing on a Wi-Fi connection. Websites cannot use tracking data when the feature is enabled, and your IP address is hidden from most apps and sites. For some reason, Secure Wi-Fi can only be enabled for a maximum of 6 hours, unless you use the Opera Max browser, in which case Secure Wi-Fi can be enabled for two days (48 hours).
Now that we are done with the security stuff, let’s talk general features offered by the Galaxy J7 Prime. There’s support for themes and access to the theme store – most themes that you see on the flagship Galaxy devices are available on the J7 Prime as well, in addition to a few themes exclusive to the…
