Attractive but not so elegant

Samsung introduced a new phablet that is slim, good-looking, metal-trimmed and very light that makes it a good alternative to premium phablets as the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. The new Samsung Galaxy A7 is not a conventional Phablet that comes with the latest and most powerful technical specs but it comes with a very nice touch of metal frame that makes it feel really solid in spite the fact that is 6.3mm thick and weights only 141g. That makes it look good and attractive too, but we expected a more elegant and innovative design to make it a stronger rival.

1. Expensive considering what you get

The A7 it comes with the Quad-core 1.8 GHz Cortex-A15& quad-core 1.3 GHz Cortex-A7-A700F, 2GB RAM and 16 GB internal storage. It sounds fine but is a bit disappointing the lack of a stronger Processing Unit, considering the phone’s class and price. We also noticed that it comes with Android KitKat on launch. What do you mean? It supposed to be Samsung’s classy and ‘chic’ device, and they launch it with older OS and with a not so capable CPU? And we didn’t notice any special extra feature as well, for example there is not a fingerprint sensor beneath the Home key. It is, maybe, a detail but the target market of such a premium phone would expect that.

2. Overheating

The most basic problem of Samsung’s new devices. Problem not solved yet. Although the Galaxy A7 feels solid and is made from good material, it doesn’t seem to be any better on this matter. When you use the Phone for a long time or for something a bit demanding on performance your hands will feel the heating and if you don’t stop using it the heat will increase, and that is of course annoying.

3. If you need it as a Dual-Sim you can’t use a micro-SD card

That new Samsung, with its stylish and attractive design and materials made is naturally targeting a slightly more business oriented audience. As a result Samsung included an option of using it as a Dual-Sim. There is an extra slot ,you can open with an ejector tool, that can be used either as an extra Sim slot or as a microSD card slot. In an age that pictures, videos, music and in general all media are getting bigger in size, if you want to use the phone with Dual Sim it limits you on the amounts of data you can have and it needs you to be careful with the memory space.

4. Built-in and not so reliable Battery

Samsung here tried to make a stylish and classy device, making it very slim, light and with a delicate touch of metal in the side. In order to combine all these characteristics together it had to made it a metal unibody phone with everything built-in. So the battery is not replaceable and is noticed from users that is not so reliable for the phones age and category as it keeps the phone alive under the expected time of use. The phone’s battery is satisfactory only if you use the phone in Ultra Power Saving Mode that is a very efficient and smart system that reduces dramatically battery consumption by shutting down unnecessary functions. It costs you though in performance and usage.

5. The camera can very easily get scratched

The very slim and light design of the phone makes it so slim that the camera was impossible to fit. And that is obvious because on a side look at the phone it is very easily noticed that the camera protrudes a lot. That makes a case needed to be purchased among the phone if you want to keep the camera unscratched. That fact is really bad for a device that its strong card is design and style because you kind of force it to wear a case and hide its stylish and attractive touch.