Samsung released the Galaxy A series towards the end of last year. It was quite surprising because this series represented the beginning of a new naming scheme of the company, plus, every member of this family featured a construction based on aluminum, a rarity for Samsung phones at that time. At first, only the Galaxy A3 and the Galaxy A5 were announced, the Galaxy A7 was announced at the beginning of this year and the Galaxy A8 was announced more recently, this is the slimmest phone the company has ever made. Last week, Samsung announced the second generation A-series, so the Galaxy A3, Galaxy A5 and Galaxy A7 are getting updated models.
The Galaxy A series became known for its good-looking design and solid build quality, and its specs were good but not flagship worthy. This is the case for the second generation Galaxy A series, but this time, the design took some inspiration from the Galaxy S6, as they are built with a metallic frame and glass in the front and back. The new series also took some inspiration from the Galaxy A8, as it features very reduced bezels on the sides of the screen. We’ve only seen official renders of these phones, but now some real-life photos of the new Galaxy A7, so we can testify how close it resembles those renders and see the phone in additional angles.
The bezels are indeed as narrow as depicted by the renders (it is said that it features a 74.3% screen-to-body ratio) and the glass covering the screen is subtlety curved on the edges, creating what’s called a 2.5D effect. The back of the phone is covered in glass and the metallic frame is a little recessed on the sides to make pressing the hardware buttons more comfortable, much like in the Galaxy S6. The bottom features the charging port (which is still Micro USB), speaker grille, 3.5 mm audio jack and a microphone. The power button and SIM card slot (probably integrating the Micro SD card slot) are located on the right side while the left side only features the volume rocker. There are no pictures of the top, so possibly there’s not much going on there. The software based on Android 5.1.1 looks typical TouchWiz and other specs include a 5.5-inch Full HD AMOLED display, an octa-core processor, 3 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage, a 13-megapixel camera on the back and a 5-megapixel one on the front and a 3,300 mAh battery.
