Samsung Galaxy A7
Out of this world (almost)
Three cameras, one phone
Despite its traditional notchless screen, the A7 could easily be mistaken for a top-end phone. You can’t miss the three cameras on the shimmering glass back panel: standard, wide-angle and depth-sensing, which provide excellent results, even if they lack optical stabilisation. And the 6in display, protected by curved Gorilla Glass, is one of Samsung’s AMOLED masterpieces, with crisp better-than-full HD resolution and excellent colour, covering the full SRGB range.
The side-mounted Samsung Pay fingerprint reader is convenient, and the only sign of compromise is a traditional Microusb port at the bottom where you might have expected USB Type-c. That means charging isn’t particularly quick, but with battery life that stretched to 17 hours 43 minutes in our video-playback test, you won’t often need to top it up.
Inside, however, things aren’t so rosy: Samsung’s eight- core Exynos 7885 processor turns out to be very average, running Android 8 smoothly but lacking oomph for more demanding apps and games. It’s not terrible, but outdone by several mid-range rivals.
Reduced from £329 to £289, the A7 competes with the pretty Huawei Honor 10 (£349 from Amazon www.snipca. com/28669, see our review, Issue 534) and the Xiaomi Pocophone F1 (£313 from Amazon www.snipca.com/30152, see Issue 545), which has a processor twice as fast. But the screen, cameras and battery life make the A7 tempting.