Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Review: J-Series Gets Competitive

Galaxy J7 Max takes forward the legacy of Samsung’s best selling J-series. Samsung has added several hardware and software trinkets including the Samsung Pay Mini to elevate the overall experience you get from it.

Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Specifications

Samsungs’ brand clout has made J-series a humongous success in India. While most of these phones have traditionally fallen short on specs front when compared to other contemporary rivals, Samsung has caught up a great deal in the last couple of years.  Recently Samsung launched its Galaxy J7 Max (FAQ) and Galaxy J7 Pro that not only flaunt an impressive spec-sheet but also borrow a few features from Galaxy A and S series for enhanced experience. We have been putting J7 Max through its paces for a few weeks now and have summed up our findings in our Galaxy J7 Max full review.

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Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Design

As the name suggests, the J7 ‘Max’ is not a compact phone by any means. Sticking to the affordable segment design ethos, the J7 Max front is covered with 2.5D glass while a major area of the rear side is metal. It’s large outfit mandates that you use both of your hands while operating it.

Up front, apart from a 5.7-inch large display, it also features an earpiece sitting at the center right between selfie camera and the front LED flash. On the bottom half, there are navigation buttons, including a fingerprint-embedded home button.

A micro USB port along with a 3.5mm audio jack can be spotted on the bottom edge. Even though Samsung’s recent offering especially A and C series phones come with Type C port, it seems Samsung is in no mood to switch to Type-C charging ports for J-series as of yet.

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The mono loudspeaker and the power button is placed on the right edge while, volume rocket, SIMs & microSD card trays are slotted on the left edge.

On the rear side, there are plastic trimmings both at the top and bottom engulfing the aforementioned metal in the middle. The rear camera is encircled by a Smart Glow LED light similar to what we saw in Galaxy J2 last year. The Smart Glow light can be customized and set to glow in different colors for notifications from different applications. It also assists with selfies while capturing one using the rear camera.

Though the new flag bearer of J7 series doesn’t really offer anything spectacular design wise, it does offer great built quality which ensures that it feels really solid in hands.

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Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Display

The Samsung Galaxy J7 comes with a 5.7-inch TFT full HD display with 386 ppi pixel density and 2.5D curved glass on top. It’s slim bezels on sides enabling a decent 72 percent screen-to-body ratio. The screen is bright and offers good viewing angles. It manages to reproduce vivid colors as long as you are not comparing it to an AMOLED display. Sun light legibility shouldn’t  be a concern either.

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It does offer auto brightness option however blue light filter is missing from the list. There is no clarity whether the Galaxy J7 Max display features any sort of protection or not, therefore it is recommended to grab a case at your earliest if you are buying the J7 Max.

Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Software

The J7 Max boots up on Android Nougat 7.0 out of the box garnished with Samsung’s Experience UI. The interface is simple, mature and offers app drawer along with an option to slot apps on the home screen. Samsung has borrowed features like Game Launcher from its premium phones and these do add value. That’s not all, multi-window, dual apps, and SOS Panic Mode are also part of the software.

Samsung with this phone introduced Pay Mini in India which is scaled down version of mobile payment solution Samsung Pay (FAQ). This miniature version primarily can be used to make payments through UPI (unified payment gateway of India) and Paytm e-wallet. To make it popular among the masses, Samsung also running several cash back offers and other promotional campaigns.

This new Samsung smartphone also offers Secure Folder which protects your personal data. To do so all you have to do is move your files into a secure folder. It also lets you move apps, notes, photos, contacts and browser history.

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Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Camera

The Galaxy J7 Max packs a 13-megapixel shooter on front and rear with f/1.9 and f/1.7 aperture lens, respectively. The default camera app is quite engaging and comes loaded with different modes including, Auto, Pro, HDR, Panorama, Night, Anti Fog, Mirror Selfie and few others. You can use beauty mode lets to add glamor to your selfies or simply play around with several handy filters.

Samsung has introduced a new Social camera feature which lets you share your clicks directly on social media or with individual contacts.  It also lets you add real time filters, emoticons, stickers, and text to images before you go on to share it on WhatsApp, Facebook or any other platform.

Talking about the performance and image quality, it manages to do fairly well in daytime shots. HDR shots also turned out well. While shooting macro shots, it does take a couple of extra seconds to focus. Selfies also turned out well with good amount of details in them. Thanks to f/1.7 aperture camera manage click decent low light shots as well.

Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Camera Samples

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Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Performance

The Samsung Galaxy J7 Max comes with MediaTek octa-core Helio P20 chipset based on power efficient big.LITTLE architecture. The four ARM Cortex A53 cores are clocked at 2.39GHZ while remaining four A53 cores are clocked at a lower 1.6GHz frequency. Samsung has paired it with 4GB of RAM which ensures phone doesn’t lag while handling basic needs. The ARM Mali T880 GPU manages to withstand gaming load but performance wise it could have been better. The temperature of the phone does shoot up while gaming but remain within manageable realms. Otherwise, the phone has no heating issues and runs perfectly cool with day-to-day usage.

The Galaxy J7 Max benchmarks Test Results

Antutu Benchmark 6: 40527

Geekbench 3 Single Core: 865

Geekbench 3 Multi Core: 3372

3D Mark Sling Shot Extreme: 603

Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Battery Backup

The J7 Max boasts a 3300mAh non-removable battery which manages to last more than a working day when we used it as our daily driver. We tested the battery life of J7 Max on 4G network by playing games, videos, web surfing, normal calling and music playback.

There is also a power saving mode and ultra saving mode which cuts down on the background apps and other processes to extend battery life. Taking about charging, it lacks support for fast charging and it takes more than an hour and a half to refill it completely.

Samsung Galaxy J7 Max Review

Samsung Galaxy J7 Max has proved to be a consistent phone. It looks elegant, if not outright premium and is powerful enough to cater to basic and moderate users with aplomb. Camera performance is certainly above average and, in fact, surprisingly good in proper lighting. I don’t find myself using Selfie camera very often, but it’s a fun feature which selfie and other active social media users should love.

The Samsung Pay mini feels limited when compared to its full version, but since we transact a lot with UPI and Paytm, it felt handy as it can be accessed conveniently by swiping up on the home screen.

However, the Galaxy J7 Max price does put it in a bracket where it will see some cut throat competition from the likes of Moto G5 Plus and Nokia 6 which are available for slightly less. We’d be remiss to not mention Samsung’s Galaxy On Max, that’s almost the same phone and is available for a lesser price to online buyers. The Galaxy J7 Max, thus, is primarily targeting offline buyers and can certainly hold its ground against the selfie brigade from Vivo, Oppo, and Gionee.