Smart, sleek and highly affordable

IF YOU’RE hankering for a smartphone with a camera that allows you to take beautiful shots with bokeh effect as well as wide-angle panorama shots but won’t leave your bank account in the red, then the Samsung Galaxy A7 is the device for you. 
And the A7 is also fast for its price range as it is powered by a fast octa-core processor and also boasts a decent size memory.
The A7 is powered by Samsung Exynos 7885 with four cores running at 2.2 GHz and four others at 1.6 GHz. It comes with 4 gigabytes of working memory or RAM and 64 GB internal storage, which is expandable with a microSD card.

The phone also has dual nano-SIM slots and another microSD slot so you can use two SIMs and can still add up to 512GB of extra storage.
The A7 performed well during the test, the touchscreen and menus were responsive and apps ran fast.
It comes with a fast Internet connection too. I used Ookla Speedtest app to measure the connection speed and I found that it achieved download speed of 47.1 Mbps and upload speed of 27.7 Mbps.
The A7 is powerful enough for running two apps at once by diving the top and bottom parts of the display when the App Pair function is activated. The App pair is available only for certain supported apps.
Moreover, the A7 is capable of playing High-Resolution Audio files. I tested it with Sony’s MDR-1ABT Hi-Res Audio headphones and the music played with good sound quality and powerful bass.
And the A7 also comes with a beautiful 6-inch Super AMOLED display with 2,220 x 1080 or FHD+ resolution. The display is good for watching HD movies and viewing photos. I enjoyed using it to watch movies from TrueID TV app.

The A7 sounds good when watching movies thanks to its Dolby Atmos function that, when used with headphones, can create and playback multi-channel soundtracks for a fully immersive and home cinema sound experience.
But the highlight of the A7 is its triple rear camera system that’s made up of a 24-megapixel main camera with fast f/1.7 aperture, an 8 MP wide-angle camera that uses an ultra wide angle lens with 120-degree field of view and a 5MP depth camera for the data used in creating bokeh or blurred background effect. The wide-angle camera has f/2.4 aperture lens while the depth camera uses a f/2.2 aperture lens.
The ultra-wide angle camera has both 77-degree and 120-degree field of view so it allows you to capture more of what catches your eyes.
When in Auto and Scene Optimiser modes, there is a button for witching between ultra wide camera and the main camera.
The Scene Optimiser mode uses AI to automatically adjust saturation, white balance and brightness levels. It has 19 customisation modes to capture natural-looking images, among them Bird, Food, City Street, Water side, Mountain, Nightview, Animal, Tree, Sky, Flower, Scenery, and Waterfall.
If you want to capture outstanding subjects with blurred background, you must use the Live Focus mode, which has a slide bar for you to adjust the level of blurriness of the background of your shots.
I found during the test that the main camera captured beautiful shots, especially when the Scene Optimiser mode was used and the Live Focus was really effective for capturing beautiful shots with bokeh effect.

The A7 is an attractive beast too, with a colourful body and premium glass-like back casing. The colour one I tested looked really sleek.
For security, the A7 comes with a fingerprint reader embedded on its power button. I found it finger print worked efficiently for unlocking the phone.
The A7 also has Face Recognition technology for unlocking the phone instantly and fast.
The A7 has a large battery of 3,300 mAh capacity that can comfortably survive a full day and play up to 48 hours of music.
Samsung Galaxy A7 with 4 GB RAM and 64GB storage retails for Bt8,990. The version with 6 GB RAM and 128 GB storage retails for Bt11,990.
 

>> Network: GSM/ HSPA / LTE
>> OS: Android 8.0
>> CPU: Samsung Exynos 7885 octa-core processor 2.2GHz, 1.6GHz
>> Memory 4GB RAM
>> Storage: 64GB, expandable with microSD card by up to 512GB
>> Display: 6-inch Super AMOLED display witth 2,220x1,080 pixels
>> Cameras: Rear: 24MP main camera with f/1.7 lens, 8.0MP wide-angle camera with f/2.4 lens, 5.0MP depth camera with f/2.2 lens; Front: 24MP with f/2.0 lens
>> Connectivity: ANI+, micro USB 2.0, 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi 802.11a, Bluetooth 5.0
>> Location: GPS, Glonass, Beidou
>> Sensors: Accelerometer, Fingerprint Sensor, Gyro Sensor, Geomagnetic Sensor, Hall Sensor, Light Sensor, Proximity Sensor
>> Battery: 3,300 mAh
>> Dimensions: 59.8 x 76.8 x 7.5mm
>> Weight: 168g