At the end of 2014, Samsung released a new all metal A-series mobile phone to prove its determination to get rid of the big plastic. As the "flagship" of the whole new series, the Galaxy A7 will naturally make people more concerned about its performance.
If we talk about the origin, A7 is likely to be used to replace the lost Galaxy Note 3 Neo series, which has always been a cheap shrink version of Note. In the Note4 generation, the Galaxy A7 is the closest to Neo's positioning. Although the screen and performance have shrunk, this time it has replaced the all metal shell.
parameter
151x76.2x6.3mm, 141g all metal body
Snapdragon 615 eight core 64 bit processor (Exynos 5430 in Korean version)
2G memory+16G ROM, supporting up to 64G TF card expansion
5.5 inch 1080P Super AMOLED screen (401ppi), the fourth generation Corning gorilla glass
13 million pixels in the front and 5 million pixels in the rear
2600mAh
Dual nano SIM cards, supporting NFC
Touchwiz based on Android 4.4
appearance
In addition to the words changing from "5" to "7", the package is almost the same as my brother's Galaxy A5. The accessories are 5V/1.55A charger, wired headset with three buttons, and spare earplugs.
The component layout of the machine is the same as that of Samsung's flagship (Galaxy S3) in 2012, providing black and white, champagne and gold. There is a large area of coating on the back metal, and the primary metal color is only displayed on the cutting edge of the edge. The metal frame is a little higher than the screen. When the 2.5D screen runs all over the street, the touch of scraping fingers is really less interesting.
As the flagship of the A series, the A7 entity home key does not have a fingerprint sensor, while the metal body Galaxy Alpha and Galaxy Note 4 previously launched have both.
The upper part of the right side of the fuselage is the power key, and the lower part is two sim card slots. Unfortunately, slot 2 is shared by SIM card and TF card. This means that TF card cannot be used when using dual cards.
The protruding of the camera is very obvious. In addition to putting the outer ring decoration of the scratch camera back flat, it will also make the machine shake due to unevenness. (6.3mm thickness does not include camera projection)
If Apple is a master of thinness, Samsung is a master of thinness. The first time I picked up the machine, it was shocked and unexpectedly light (the red rice note of the same screen size was 190g, and the magic blue note was 145g).
The large body brought by the 5.5 inch screen makes it look like note4. The body is large but light, and it feels good to hold.
display
The display and note3 are both in 1080P diamond pentile arrangement, but because the 5.5 inch screen is smaller than the 5.7 inch of note3 (the area difference is 8%), the PPI is higher and has gone to 401.
The maximum brightness of the machine is only 349 nits, which is lower than that of the note 4 and S5, but higher than that of the A screen obtained by other people (moto). However, although the brightness of screen A is low, their reflectivity is lower, so the readability in the sun is not bad. In addition, the system has display mode options to control the screen color temperature and saturation.
system
The TouchWiz on A7 has been lightweight, and the system experience is not different from that on S5 and A5. The biggest difference from the old version is that the task management interface has become a layered card similar to Android 5.0.
Samsung has added the split screen function to this 5.5 inch screen machine, and it also supports double opening of the same application. In terms of single hand optimization, Samsung once gave three mainstream solutions: "keyboard single hand mode, floating keys, small screen mode (the screen can be triggered after right stroke and left stroke)".
In addition, Samsung has also added practical small functions such as sensitive touch (which can be operated with gloves), intelligent screen lighting (which will always light when the camera detects a face), and intelligent screen rotation (which also detects the direction of the face with the camera, rather than conventional gravity sensing).
performance
A7 provides Snapdragon 615 and Exynos 5430 processors, both of which are eight core big LITTLE architecture, the latter is a 20nm process, using Mali-T628 MP6 GPU, which is quite powerful (also used in Galaxy Alpha and MX4 Pro), but this version is only available in South Korea, and this test is Snapdragon 615 version.
The original Snapdragon 615 is a 28nm 4-core 1.7 GHz A53+4-core 1.0 GHz A53, but it may be to control power consumption, most of the models that have been launched have the highest dominant frequency at 1.5GHz.
The performance of Snapdragon 615 can only be said to be the level of a mid tier computer. In the Geekbench 3 score for CPU computing performance, its performance is close to that of the old flagship note3.
In the GPU test, the cruel facts once again proved that Adreno 405 on Snapdragon 615 could not support 1080P large-scale games at all. Its GPU performance is only half of that of Mali-T628 on Exynos 5430. Although this is much better than Adreno 306 of A5 Snapdragon 410, the A5 uses 720P, which leads to their performance gap being significantly reduced.
In the web page test, the JavaScript performance of A7 surprised people. Even though Samsung's native browser has an open JS engine, the score is still not ideal.
Although definitely inferior to note4, the score of BrowserMark 2.1 test is good, and daily surfing will be very smooth. In general, the computing performance of Snapdragon 615 is OK, but its graphics performance is poor.
photograph
The A7 rear camera should use Samsung's 13 million pixel 4:3 sensor. Its photo interface is the same as my brother's A5. Although detailed settings such as ISO and white balance require several more menus, ordinary mode switching is quite convenient.
The white balance of the machine is obviously yellow, and the AMOLED screen itself is oversaturated, which makes this problem more obvious when shooting. On the whole, the performance of this camera is close to that of A5, which is quite outstanding among competitors at the same level. Although the tolerance (dynamic range) is not very good, and it is easy to lose the details of dark/bright parts, the daytime proofs have strong discrimination and less noise.
Original drawing
HDR sample
Original drawing
HDR sample
The HDR effect is still Samsung's ancestral divine calculation method, which can process quickly, and the proof effect is very natural, without losing details, and the white balance is broken back by the way.
Front camera sample
Panorama proof
A7 actually publicizes more selfie functions, with its front camera of 5 million pixels and 106 degrees wide angle. The hardware parameters are not special, but Samsung has given many small software functions. It supports panoramic shooting, beauty function, and dynamic GIF generation. In addition, it also has a novel rear camera selfie function: select a rectangular range in advance, turn the rear camera back to itself, and when a face appears in the box, it will automatically trigger photography.
However, there is still a problem with the mosaic algorithm of the panoramic mode. The requirements for the balance of the swing speed are high. If you are not careful, you will see the same ultra obvious stitching trace as the above figure. Moreover, the pixels of the composite photos will be reduced from 2576 x 1920 to 2000 x 1648. From the perspective of image quality, the front camera sample has a heavy graininess, and the image is not very good. Of course, Sister Paper may not hope that the front camera's discrimination is too good
Endurance&Others
The 2600mAh battery of the Galaxy A7 is close to that of the Galaxy S4, but the Snapdragon 615 consumes a lot of power, and the 5.5 inch screen also puts some pressure on the endurance. Surprisingly, however, the machine can maintain more than 24 hours of calls, as well as nearly 10 hours of web browsing and video playback. The overall rating is 83 hours, which is similar to Samsung S5 and Sony Z3, but lower than the 90 hours of Galaxy S4.
Moderate use runs for 2 days, and light use barely runs for 3 days, which is no less than the 52 hour run of Galaxy Alpha (1860mAh), the ancestor of all metal A series.
In terms of miscellaneous items, the speaker volume of A7 is higher than that of A5 and iPhone 6+, but the strange thing is that the volume is relatively low when the phone is placed outside.
In addition, the machine supports LTE-A CAT4 network (upload 50mbps, download 150mbps), but unfortunately, only slot 1 supports 3 and 4G, while slot 2 can only run at 2G. However, it is a two-way machine. You can use one card to answer the phone while the other card is talking. However, similar meetings with two cards have a little impact on the endurance.
summary
The Galaxy A7 has an all metal shell and good workmanship. Except for the Korean version, which can happily use the 5430 processor, the other versions use the Snapdragon 615. The performance of the latter is far from the current flagship, even worse than the MT6752, the most powerful chip of MediaTek.
Although the color matching of Tuhaojin is a bit rustic, the machine has a good feel, and the camera and screen performance are both good. The endurance is far better than expected (the performance is even close to Note4).
However, it is the most advanced mobile phone in the A series, and with the price of 2999 yuan of the Bank of China, our expectations are very high, but the actual performance of the machine can only be regarded as the level of the mid-range machine. You should know that this price is enough to buy the flagship note3. The MotoX, LG G3 and HTC M8 (although they can't be seen when taking photos) of the Bank of China can also be chosen. The performance and system experience of any of them will be much better. If the domestic machine is included, its cost performance will be even worse.
fabulous:
Step on:
TF card shares the card slot with one of the SIM cards. When dual cards cannot be used, insert the memory card
Guohang uses Xiaolong 615 instead of Exynos 5430, which has weak performance and strong heat
expensive
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