Samsung Galaxy On7 Prime review: Budget smartphone for shopping enthusiasts

Samsung Galaxy On7 Prime: Facing stiff competition from Chinese brands, South Korean electronics giant Samsung has taken the e-commerce line to launch its budget offering, the Galaxy On7 Prime. Priced at Rs 12,990 for the base variant – 32 GB internal storage and 3 GB RAM – the smartphone offers the Samsung Mall, a first of its kind shopping app, in addition to the usual features.

Business Standard reviewed the Galaxy On7 Prime to test the Samsung Mall app, and the overall performance of the smartphone. Here are our observations:

Samsung Mall

The Galaxy On7 Prime is the first smartphone to feature the Samsung Mall app, which promises to enhance users’ shopping experience by making product search easier. However, in real-life scenario, the app has its hits and misses.

The Mall feature works through a dedicated app or camera interface. To make a search, you need to click a photo of the product and the mall app would make an online search for it across e-commerce platforms to look for products matching the photograph. The app shows close results and compares the prices, too. But the result is not always correct; sometimes it shows irrelevant results.

Design

For a smartphone with a 5.5-inch screen, the Galaxy On7 comes across as huge and with its share of avoidable design flaws. The front is dominated by a 16:9 aspect ratio screen, which leaves huge bezels on the top and bottom. The fingerprint scanner is placed under the home button at the bottom of the screen, along with capacitive option and back key, to utilise the bottom bezel.

The back looks old-school with a three-piece bland design, which uses metal at the centre and plastic blocks on the top and bottom. The power button is placed on the right side, along with a mono speaker right above it.

Volume rocker keys, SIM card slots and the microSD card slot are on the left side.