[First Look] Samsung’s wefie-centric J7 Prime

Creating a midrange phone these days isn’t just about churning out a blower that simply offers bigger bang for the buck. To pique the minds, hearts and wallets of the hoi polloi, you need to have a compelling proposition that extends beyond dangling a cheaper price tag in front of their eyes and their upper midrange J7 Prime aims to offer exactly that. On top of offering some serious bang for the buck , the J7 Prime also has as its main gambit an emphasis on taking good wefies – that’s group shots for you lot out there who don’t speak Gen Z lingo – and has custom hardware to do so too.

While the camera adheres to the standard doctrine of having a more powerful rear camera than the front, the J7 Prime’s front camera has significantly been beefed up for the task. The front facing 8-MP sensor comes with a wide F/1.9 aperture lens akin to that used on last year’s flagship Galaxy S6 camera. Basically, this allows for more light to enter the sensor to deliver a cleaner image with less image noise and commensurately better low light performance.

The front facing camera also has a wide selfie mode first seen on the Galaxy Note 4 that ensures you can take in a 170-degree swath of the landscape and pretty much the equivalent of full sized football team in your snap. Firing it up is equally fast with a double tap on the home button bringing up the camera.

The rear camera also has a similar F/1.9 aperture and a 13-MP sensor with a slew of modes that include a HDR mode, a night mode for low light shots and a Pro shot mode that lets you tweak exposure value, ISO and white balance

Externally, the J7 Prime looks surprisingly posh with an anodised dual-toned matte metal finish that has not been seen on any other Galaxy series phone to date. Locally, it comes in a gold finish with white trim though our sample unit came in a far more fetching dark, almost midnight blue with black trim. The finish itself repels fingerprints and is seamless, save for a pair of antenna bands on the top and bottom of the backplate. The rest of the finish is in keeping with current standards of tech chic, with rounded corners and a 2.5D display offered excellent tactility and smooth deployment out of your pockets without snagging on anything in the way.

Under the hood, the J7 Prime comes with a 1.6GHz Exynos 7870 octacore processor of recent vintage built on their 14nm FinFET process that offers better power efficiency over its predecessors. Paired with this is 3GB RAM and 32GB of expandable storage via a dedicated microSD slot. The phone also has a pair of dedicated SIM card slots too. It also has a fingerprint reader that double as a home button. A 3,300mAh battery juiced by a microUSB port keeps the phone running for about 20 hours or so before needing a recharge. The J7 Prime retails for RM1,199 and is available at all Samsung concept stores and dealers nationwide.