Samsung Galaxy J7 review

Gallery sans wireless features

The TouchWiz gallery has been borrowed from the Galaxy flagships (with a reduced feature set). The default view shows photos grouped based on time. Thumbnails are shown on a clean white background and you can change their size with a pinch zoom.

Gallery

Editing tools include simple things like cropping and making collages, you can go into the Photo editor for more advanced editing options (note that you have to download those, they wasn't pre-installed). There's no support for online galleries though.

The Share button allows you to send a photo to a wireless printer, but the DLNA/TV sharing functionality is missing.

Editing a photo • sharing a photo

Only Google Play Music

Samsung's TouchWiz music player was one of the most feature-rich apps, but Samsung dropped it in favor of Google Play Music. This means no Sound Alive, not even an equalizer.

Only the standard Google Play music is provided

It's a capable player for offline music play, it does online streaming too. You can bolster your music collection with stuff from the Google store too.

Shopping for a new album

The Samsung Galaxy J7 also features an FM radio, a rarity on Galaxy phones these days. It can record radio broadcast (subject to local laws) and provides an alternative to your music collection or internet "radio".

FM radio with broadcast recording

Video player

The video player is similar to the gallery. It supports all kinds of video file types and codecs, up to 4K 2160p encoded with the new H.265/HEVC codec. As usual, multi-channel audio (AC-3, DTS) is not supported out of the box.

The pop-up video player is gone, but you can still beam can beam the audio over Bluetooth. There are extensive subtitle settings with adjustable font and text size, text color, edge and background. Multiple presets are available and you can make your own.

Browsing videos • Subtitles and other settings

Audio quality is mostly good

The Samsung Galaxy J7 put in a very solid performance in the active external amplifier part of our audio quality test. The smartphone produced had perfectly clean output and above average volume levels here to round up a great showing.

Sadly, degradation when you plug in a pair of headphones is rather prominent so you are left with less than impressive results in that case. Some intermodulation distortion appears and we measured a fair amount of stereo crosstalk. It's not bad, mind you, it just won't win any awards -

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Samsung Galaxy J7	+0.03, -0.17	-96.1	96.3	0.0078	0.011	-73.2
Samsung Galaxy J7 (headphones attached)	+0.25, -0.09	-95.5	89.6	0.0087	0.191	-42.6
Samsung Galaxy E7	+0.02, -0.06	-94.4	91.3	0.0029	0.0090	-88.8
Samsung Galaxy E7 (headphones attached)	+0.30, -0.01	-92.6	90.9	0.033	0.203	-53.9
Asus Zenfone 2	+0.03, -0.04	-92.4	92.6	0.0035	0.019	-90.2
Asus Zenfone 2 (headphones attached)	+0.06, -0.04	-92.3	92.4	0.013	0.048	-80.8
HTC Desire 820	+0.03, -0.20	-92.3	92.4	0.046	0.047	-72.2
HTC Desire 820 (headphones attached)	+0.09, -0.12	-92.1	92.1	0.158	0.176	-39.7
Oppo Find 7a	+0.03, -0.16	-92.7	92.6	0.0057	0.072	-92.0
Oppo Find 7a (headphones)	+0.05, -0.07	-91.5	92.7	0.0042	0.054	-15.7
OnePlus One	+0.02, -0.07	-94.1	93.8	0.0064	0.011	-94.3
OnePlus One (headphones)	+0.77, -0.05	-91.4	89.7	0.019	0.485	-53.7

Samsung Galaxy J7 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.