Samsung Galaxy A7 Review

Galaxy A7 2016 Design

The first thing you notice about the Galaxy A7 2016 is how similar it is to the Galaxy S6. With the phone sharing a lot of design cues from the Galaxy S6, it looks every bit as premium as Samsung's 2015 flagship offering. There's 2.5D Gorilla Glass 4 at the front and back, and the chamfered metal sides combined with the rounded edges make the phone comfortable to hold and use.

Galaxy A7 2016 Hardware

The Galaxy A7 is being offered in two variants: an international model that is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC, and a version that runs the Exynos 7580 SoC. The version sold in India features the Exynos 7580. Unlike the Galaxy S6's Exynos 7420, which was built on a 14nm Low Power Early (LPE) FinFET process, the Exynos 7580 is produced on the standard 28nm node. It offers eight Cortex A53 cores (ARMv8-A) clocked at 1.6GHz and an ARM Mali-T720 MP2 GPU.

The hardware combined with 3GB of RAM means that the Galaxy A7 handles almost everything you throw at it without any issues. Only when you play the most visually-intensive games do you start noticing the occasional frame-rate issues, and that's mostly to do with the Mali-T720 MP2.

Things are not as great on the storage front, as you can quickly run through the 11GB of available storage within a few days if you're a heavy user. There's no 32GB variant available, but you can extend storage with the microSD slot, which takes in cards up to 128GB.

You get LTE Category 6 connectivity with FDD LTE bands 1 (2100MHz), 3 (1800MHz ), 5 (850MHz ), 7 (2600MHz ), 8 (900MHz ), and 20 (800MHz), and TDD LTE band 40 (2300MHz) on-board. There's also Bluetooth 4.1 and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, but no Wi-Fi ac. While Samsung Pay is not yet officially available in the country, the phone does offer NFC and MST for when the service makes its debut.

A note on connectivity: The Galaxy A7 sold in India is meant for use in the subcontinent. Taking it outside the country leads to a lot of strange behavior. That fact became very clear to me as I used the phone with a T-Mobile SIM, which led to crashes and reboots every 10 minutes. The situation was such that every time I tried to place a call, the phone would reboot. Resetting the device did not fix the issue, but as soon as I returned to India, everything started functioning normally. As the phone does not have the requisite LTE bands for international carriers

Galaxy A7 2016 Display

The Galaxy A7 comes with a 5.5-inch Full HD (that's 1080p) Super AMOLED display with 401 pixels per inch. Samsung has been producing stunning displays of late, and the same holds true for the screen on the Galaxy A7. It may not be a higher-resolution Quad HD display, but it offers excellent color contrast. With a maximum brightness of 536 nits in Auto, you can view the display outdoors without any issues. In Adaptive display mode, the color range and saturation are automatically adjusted, giving you punchy colors and inky blacks. Bezels along the sides of the display are slim, which gives you an edge-to-edge viewing experience when consuming media, or reading text.

One-handed mode has made its way across from the Galaxy Note 5, which shrinks the screen size to about 75 percent of the original, making it easier to access the entire contents of the screen. There are arrow keys that let you move the position of the screen to the left or right, and a button at the top that lets you switch back to full-screen mode. You can enable one-handed mode by pressing the home button thrice in quick succession.

As the device features a 5.5-inch screen, you get Multi-Window mode, which lets you use two apps at the same time. Not all apps support the split-screen view, but all of Samsung's stock apps as well as the more popular apps work just fine.

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