Samsung Galaxy On7 First Impressions: A competitive budget 4G smartphone

Samsung has finally come up with its answer to the likes of Micromax and Xiaomi, who have disrupted the smartphone market with their budget offerings. The company today launched the Galaxy On5 and On7 4G-enabled Android smartphones in India. These smartphones have been priced aggressively at Rs 8,990 and Rs 10,990.

With these smartphones, Samsung looks forward to beat the intense competition set by Chinese smartphone players as well as local vendors. Manu Sharma, VP - Marketing, Samsung told GizBot that that the USP of these smartphones is good hardware combined with additional software features such as My Galaxy platform and MixRadio app, which makes them attractive for their price.

PROS

• 13MP rear camera
• 4G LTE support

CONS

• No Corning Gorilla Glass
• Bulky

We have lately seen many smartphone OEMs following the online only sales model, for this helps in cutting down the price of the phone. Samsung too takes the same path for the Galaxy On5 and On7. These phones will be made available exclusively via Flipkart starting midnight tonight.

The Galaxy On7 is the company's bigger-display phone with 5.5-inch screen. We checked out the phone at its launch event and here are our first impressions:

Design and Display:

Samsung Galaxy On7 has this uncanny resemblance with the company's recently launched Z3 Tizen OS smartphone. The design and form factor is quite similar. If you will look at the front side of both the phone, you will not be able to notice any major difference, though the rear panel looks slightly different.

The Galaxy On7 dons a plastic chassis with the company's usual rectangular-ish design, with sightly rounded corners. The front of the phone has a 5MP selfie camera, 5.5-inch screen, and a hard home-key placed between two capacitive keys. The right and left sides of the phone have power key and volume key. The top has been kept clean, while the bottom has microUSB pin slot and 3.5mm audio jack.

The rear panel has a 13MP rear camera with flash and Samsung's branding.

Despite carrying 5.5-inch display, the Galaxy On7 is pretty comfortable to be used single-handedly. It looks nice.

The 5.5-inch HD display is vivid, reproduces colors well and offers good viewing angles. Sadly, it does not come with Corning Gorilla Glass or other glasses for protection, which makes it vulnerable to daily wear and tear, and damages.

Processor:

Samsung galaxy On7 is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset clocked at 1.2GHz, coupled with 1.5GB of RAM. Going by the chipset' performance on other devices, we feel that it should be good for the On7's specs. However, competitors in this space have offering with octa-core chipset and higher RAM of 3GB.

As for memory space, the On7 has 8GB of native storage space out of which 3.46GB is consumed by the system memory. Considering that almost half of the memory is occupied, you get only 4.5GB of free storage.

There is a microSD card slot available on the phone to expand its memory by up to 128GB.

Camera:

The Galaxy On7 sports a 13MP auto-focus rear camera with LED flash, and a 5MP front facing snapper for selfies and video chats. The ambient lighting conditions were not apt for testing camera and we will reserve our take on camera performance for detailed review.

Software:

Samsung Galaxy On5 runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with native UI. The key highlight in the software department is the addition of Samsung's recently launched My Galaxy app, which features deals and discounts from companies such as Pizza Hut, ibibo and more.

Moreover, the phone also comes with MixRadio app preloaded on it.

Others:

This is a dual-SIM smartphone with support for 4G LTE network which is another point highlighted by the company during its launch event. On the battery front, the phone has 3000mAh battery which can give upto 12 hours of Internet usage on 4G network, as per company claims.

Moreover, the phone features Ultra Data Saving mode which is powered by Opera Max. It compressed data by up to 50 percent.

Conclusion:

Samsung Galaxy On7 makes for a good smartphone option who are very particular about brands, considering that there are very few smartphone offerings with such features and specs from top OEMs. In fact, the phone will be giving competition to local vendors as well. Though, phones like Micromax Canvas Xpress 2, which is priced very low in comparison.

To know more about the performance of the device, wait for our detailed review.