The Samsung Galaxy C7 Pro, a mid-range successor to last year’s Galaxy C7, aims to deliver exceptional all-round performance. Launched in World after the Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro, another mid-range smartphone loaded with some of the company’s flagship features, the Galaxy C7 Pro comes across as a mixed bag of hardware and software.
Design
The Galaxy C7 Pro features a metallic body, with a 2.5D curved Gorilla Glass covering almost the entire front. On the front, the side bezels around the display are almost negligible, but the top and bottom bezels are too big – even odd – especially in the white-gold variant that we reviewed. The huge top and bottom bezels do bring down the overall design quotient of the device.
Display
The Galaxy C7 Pro sports a 5.7-inch full-HD super-AMOLED screen. The screen is bright for an AMOLED unit and throws punchy colours with exceptional contrast and deep blacks – something that AMOLED screens are known for. The display can be adjusted with four pre-defined screen modes – adaptive, AMOLED cinema, AMOLED photo and basic. Each mode offers a different colour setting, but we preferred to keep it to adaptive for its natural colours.
Hardware
The Galaxy C7 Pro is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 626 processor, which runs on octa-core at a frequency of 2.2 GHz. The processor is no powerhouse. However, it is not too bad, given that the Galaxy C7 Pro is a mid-range device with high ambitions; the processor is good for day-to-day tasks and still holds some power to process a few heavy-duty jobs. The Galaxy C7 Pro offers 64 GB of internal memory and 4 GB of RAM. And, if you find 64 GB of internal memory less for your data, there is also the option of extending the memory to up to 256 GB using a microSD card. A dual-sim smartphone, the Galaxy C7 Pro also supports 4G VoLTE services. Just in case you are curious to know if the phone is compatible with Reliance Jio, the answer is yes, and it seems to work pretty flawlessly with Jio.
Software
Coming to the software, the Galaxy C7 Pro runs on Android Marshmallow. Yes, surprising though it may sound, Samsung’s latest mid-range smartphone indeed runs the year old Marshmallow. We, however, expect that the Nougat update will soon hit the device. It would have been great if the latest Android version had been pre-loaded and made available right out of the box. The software is optimised enough to work in sync with the hardware and there is almost no visible lag in normal course. But the device seems to go short of processing power if you use some processor-demanding tasks. Heavy games like Asphalt 8 and Need for Speed run perfectly, but they skip frames here and there after prolonged gaming sessions.
Camera
The Galaxy C7 Pro features 16-megapixel (MP) cameras on both the rear and front sides. Both sport a bright f/1.9 aperture that helps capture bright shots even during low-light conditions. The rear camera is assisted with a dual-tone LED flash that comes handy in dark and extremely low-lit conditions. Another important feature that seems to be a big miss in the Galaxy C7 Pro is the lack of ‘Pro’ mode features. The ‘pro’ mode in the camera settings allows manual customisation, but this is limited to some basics that are hardly ‘pro’ features. Also, the settings provided in the pro mode add little to the frame; the automatic scene selection seems to work well for shooting.
Battery
The Galaxy C7 Pro is powered by a 3,300 mAh non-removeable battery that supports adaptive charging with a charger that comes along with the unit. The company claims 100 per cent battery within 100 minutes. The battery in the Galaxy C7 Pro is enough to keep the show running for one full day on medium to heavy use. The use of power-intensive applications and background data does not drain much battery juices; the phone performs consistently for at least a day without recharge.
Verdict
The Galaxy C7 Pro is currently priced at Rs 27,990 on Amazon India. At this price point, the smartphone does not seem to give rivals sleepless nights. The smartphone offers a mixed bag of hardware and software features that enable decent overall utility by the smartphone, but the absence of value-added features like Samsung Pay and Pro camera mode is a significant let-down.