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You get a very solid 64GB storage too. In the past Samsung’s lower-cost phones have missed out on some features of similarly-priced rivals phones. Not so this time. However, it does not offer the IP-certified water resistance of last year’s A7. When even the OnePlus 6T leaves out water resistance, it seems silly to complain too loudly. Samsung Galaxy A7 — Screen The Samsung Galaxy A7 has, on one level, the most advanced screen available at the price. It’s a 2280 x 1080 pixel 6-inch screen.

The Super AMOLED panel is the special part. Samsung is one of the few companies that can “afford” to fit such a screen into these phones, because these are Samsung panels. At this resolution and size there are pros and cons to using OLED. The colour coverage is wider than a mid-range LCD screen, and as ever Samsung capitalises on this with some great colour modes. There are four, based on different recognised colour gamuts, just like a Note 9. Colour fidelity may not be at Note 9 level, but for the price it is great.

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OLED screens also have unbeatable contrast, thanks to their light-up pixels. The Galaxy A7 offers the best colour and contrast you can get at this level, but not quite the best sharpness. Thanks to the PenTile sub-pixel arrangement of Samsung OLED screens, the phone looks slightly less sharp than a 1080p phone with an LCD panel.

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However, the effect is minor. You’ll just see a tiny bit of fuzz around characters when you look very close, and the Galaxy A7 is still distinctly sharper than, for example, the Moto One. Alongside the Honor 8X this phone has one of the best displays in this class. And for late-night movies, the A7 is easily the better of the two. OLED tech makes it much easier to apply the Galaxy A7’s always-on screen feature, again thanks to those light-up pixels.

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Only the lit parts of the screen use significant power, where a standard LCD is either lit-up, or not. The always-on screen shows the time, battery level and notification icons. You can turn this feature off if you find it distracting. Samsung Galaxy A7 — Software The Samsung Galaxy A7 runs Android 8.0, and there’s a custom interface on top. It’s not the latest version of Android and nowadays Samsung’s interface is one of the most visually distinctive of all the UIs. Check out those soft keys: they’re Samsung hieroglyphs, nothing like what you see in standard Android. The Galaxy A7 is also packed with a lot of extra apps.

This sounds like the makings of a reason to avoid the Galaxy A7. It’s not, though, just a reason some of you may want to consider an Android One alternative. The Galaxy A7’s software is essentially the same as that used by the Galaxy S9 and Note 9. And many of the preinstalled apps are fairly good. Samsung Health? Not bad. Voice recorder?

Handy. And preinstalling the Microsoft Office suite seems inoffensive enough. It only annoys when it tries to take over things Google does well, such as auto-filling of forms and passwords.

Samsung tries harder than any Android maker to get under your skin. The software works perfectly well, though. General performance is among the best at the price, with minimal lag, and no sense your apps get closed down in the background too “early”. Every phone continues to keep recently-used apps “open” in a frozen saved state. It’s what enables standard phone multi-tasking.

But if RAM is limited, these have to be jettisoned fairly quickly.

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