First impressions: With Galaxy E series, Samsung falls short of Xiaomi-OnePlus bandwagon

Samsung on Monday launched the **Galaxy A7**  , its slimmest smartphone sporting a metallic body. It looks like Samsung has finally warmed up to the idea of having metallic phones after the the success of the Galaxy Note 4, which had a metallic frame. Last week however, Samsung had launched **four new phones** in Mumbai - two from the Galaxy A series and two from the Galaxy E series. We take a closer look at the Galaxy E series, which we saw during the launch. Build and Design [caption id=“attachment_249644” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  The Galaxy E series phones come with a metallic edge which measures just 7.3mm thick[/caption] Design wise, the Galaxy E series brings nothing new to the table. Both the Galaxy E7 and Galaxy E5 sport the all-too-familiar plastic bodies. But we liked the fact that both the phones are slim - at around 7.3mm. The rear plastic cover does not give a very good grip and it is not removable. The phones sport silver-coloured metallic edges with the volume rocker button on the left hand side and the power/standby button on the right hand side. The SIM card and microSD card slots are located along the edge of the phone just under the power/standby button. Overall the design is boring and you cannot tell the E series phone apart from any of Samsung’s countless old Galaxy series handsets. Build quality is decent, but the Galaxy A series is relatively sturdier.

  Display One area about which the Samsung representatives kept talking a lot was display. And the Super AMOLED display in this series does look impressive. One could see that the standard warm tones on the display and colours tend to pop out. Black levels were good. While the E7 has a 5.5-inch display, the display of the E5 with the 5-inch screen looked sharper in comparison. Viewing angles are quite good and we did not notice any colour shifting. Camera [caption id=“attachment_249646” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  The rear camera has the regular interface which is seen on most Galaxy phone cameras[/caption] The Galaxy E7 sports a 13MP rear camera and the Galaxy E5 sports an 8MP rear camera with LED flash unit. The camera features the standard shooting modes. But more than the rear camera, Samsung was stressing about its 5MP front-facing camera with a lot of additions for the selfie-enthusiasts. The front-facing camera lets you shoot panoramic selfies, make animated GIFs out of a series of selfie shots as well as shoot selfies using gestures. Looks like Samsung wants to ride the selfie-smartphone wave which started last year. Processor [caption id=“attachment_249645” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  The Samsung Galaxy E7 (seen above) as well as the Galaxy E5 house the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset with 1.2GHz quad-core processor[/caption] Both the E5 and E7 sport the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset which houses a 1.2GHz quad-core processor. This puts the phones in the mid-range category. While the E5 sports 1.5GB RAM, the E7 has 2GB RAM. While using the phone, we did not notice any lag while swiping through the menus. Over 1GB of RAM means that the phones will be more than capable of handling regular tasks such as multi-tab browsing, playing casual games and so on. OS  The Galaxy E5 and E7 run the Android 4.4 KitKat OS which comes with the proprietary Samsung TouchWiz UI which we are all familiar with. The bloatware is thankfully minimal. Battery The 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy E7 sports a 2,950mAh battery whereas the 5-inch Samsung Galaxy E5 comes with 2,400 mAh battery capacity. Both the phones have a non-removable Li-ion batteries. For the screen size and the resolution, the battery capacities seems sufficient enough to last out one working day. But we can only confirm this on testing the device. It also features the Ultra Power-saving mode seen on the Note 4. Conclusion Coming back to the statement we made before, the Samsung Galaxy E series does seem like old wine in new bottle. Samsung has priced the E7 at Rs 23,000 and the Galaxy E5 at Rs 19,300. Looking at the specifications on offer, the prices seem to be on the higher side. specially considering the fact that both these phones still sport a plastic body. While Samsung said that it has launched the Galaxy E series keeping the college-going youngsters in mind, it needs to note that these same youngsters can get a much higher specced phone for less. We have already seen phones such as **Asus Zenfone 5** , **Redmi Note 3G**   (or the Redmi Note 4G which is at Rs 9,999) and more recently the **Yu Yureka** offering better feature set for a much lower price. Whether Samsung is charging for the brand name, the Super AMOLED display or the selfie-features on its front-camera, is anyone’s guess. One can however easily spend a few thousand rupees more and get the metallic body sporting Galaxy A series handsets.