Samsung Galaxy J5 8GB

At a time when 5.5-inch smartphones have become the norm and the word 'phablet' doesn't sound as ridiculous as it did a couple of years ago, the Galaxy J5 comes across as a breath of fresh air. Thanks to its 5-inch display, the smartphone is compact and nestles into a single hand comfortably.

The Samsung Galaxy J5 sports a 5-inch Super AMOLED display panel, which offers impressive colours and is quite sharp with a screen resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels. AMOLED displays are also known for their high contrast levels, and hence the phone is able to display really 'black' blacks. We didn’t find any issues with the brightness or the viewing angles of the handset either.

The changes in Samsung’s ideology aren’t just external, but also apply to its slimmed-down custom interface, which was earlier slammed for its feature spam. The custom layer on the Galaxy J5 is based on Android Lollipop 5.1 and bodes well with Google’s Material Design. The UI is extremely smooth, and there are hardly any over-the-top features.

The Galaxy J5 features a 13-megapixel snapper at the back, which has a wide aperture of f/1.9, the same as Samsung’s flagship offerings this year. At the front, the smartphone has a 5MP snapper. Interestingly enough, the device not only sports an LED flash at the back, but gets one at the front too. The custom camera app on the smartphone is quite feature-packed, with two strips at the right and left offering all the options (when the device is held horizontally). You can capture the scene, choose to switch to video or the front-facing camera, see previous images or change the mode. The phone offers modes ranging from Pro (ability to change ISO sensitivity, exposure and white balance), Panorama, and Sound & Shot, among others. There are also some effects that you can apply in real-time such as Grayscale and sepia. The settings menu has the options to change picture or video size, turn on grid lines, etc.

Our praise for the Galaxy J5 continues in the performance section as well, as even though it’s a budget offering, the Chaebol has provided it with a decent amount of horsepower. It comes powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 CPU, which offers four 64-bit capable Cortex-A53 cores humming at 1.2GHz. The brand is also promoting the device as a gaming-centric offering, and hence it’s equipped with the Adreno 306 GPU. The combination ensures smooth working, be it while running basic apps, running heavy websites or even playing 3D games such as Badland. For multitasking, the device features 1.5GB of RAM, which is able to handle multiple apps with ease.