Samsung Launches A Salvo – Galaxy E Series

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Jan 16, 2015

As we mentioned in our earlier article that even though the festive season was over yet for the tech companies and especially the smartphone companies are still in the mood of an extended festive season and unveiling new product lineage with the start of 2015. Samsung (SSNLF, Financial) the global leader shortly unveiled two new Galaxy A Series phones and two new Galaxy E Series phones after a successful run with the Galaxy Note 4 through the festive season. Of the new releases the Galaxy E Series is the most talked about and so let us take a better look at the new E Series.

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The design aspect

From the design aspect the Galaxy E Series do not present much of newness. Both the Galaxy E7 and Galaxy E5 sport the all-too-familiar plastic bodies. Yet both the E Series protégée’s are very slim and is about 7.3mm in thickness.

The rear plastic cover cannot be removed and does not give a good grip. The phones sport silver-coloured metallic edges with the volume rocker button on the left hand side and the power/standby button on the right hand side.

Both the SIM card and the MicroSD memory card slot are provided alongside the edge of the phone below the power/standby button. The new E Series phones do not sport anything new in terms of design and resembles its predecessors from the older Galaxy Series. The E series carries the Samsung legacy and does not stand apart. The build quality is decent but nothing to hype about in the design aspect.

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Display features

The Samsung shop floor is going all gaga about the new display system of the E series. The display sports a super AMOLED screen which is quite eye-catching. One could see that the standard warm tones on the display and colors tend to pop out. The E7 comes with a 5.5-inch display and the E5 comes with a 5-inch display and the images look sharper. The viewing angles are considerably enhanced and the color balance has been maintained well.

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Camera clicks

The Galaxy E7 flaunts a 13MP rear camera and the Galaxy E5 sports an 8MP rear camera with LED flash unit. The camera comes with the standard shooting modes. But more than the rear camera, in these tech gadgets Samsung has focused on the front camera which has a 5MP picture capability in order to cater to the ongoing selfie frenzy. The front-facing camera lets you shoot panoramic selfies which means not just single selfies but also group selfies, make animated GIFs out of a series of selfie shots as well as shoot selfies using gestures like the wink of your eye. From the features Samsung has worked on it can be clearly understood that Samsung wants to ride high on the ongoing selfie trend and regain its lost popularity.

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The brain

Both the E5 and E7 are powered by the Qualcomm (QCOM, Financial) Snapdragon 410 chipset which houses a 1.2GHz quad-core processor. This puts the phones in the mid-range category. While the E5 sports 1.5GB RAM, the E7 has 2GB RAM. The processing speed is decent and there are no noticeable swipe lags. In any case a phone with more than 1GB of RAM is expected to be smooth on regular tasks such as multi-tab browsing, playing casual games and so on. But there is nothing outstanding in this front in the new Samsung offerings.

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Operating system

The Galaxy E5 and E7 would be running on the older android 4.4 KitKat OS which comes with the proprietary Samsung TouchWiz UI which we are all familiar with. The bloatware is thankfully minimal but otherwise there is nothing new or remarkable in this segment.

Powerhouse

The 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy E7 runs on a 2,950mAh battery whereas the 5-inch Samsung Galaxy E5 runs on a 2,400 mAh battery capacity. Both the phones have non-removable Li-ion batteries. For the screen size and the resolution, the battery capacities looks to be sufficient enough to last out one working day but nothing remarkable. Just like its predecessor Note 4 it also comes with the Ultra Power-saving mode to battle the battery blues of the smartphone segment.

First impression

The Samsung Galaxy E series does seem like old wine in new bottle. The E7 sports a price tag of $370, and the E5 will come for $310. But going by its average features the price seems to be a bit premium. According to Samsung the target audience for these phones would be the young college goers, but the target audience would rather go for phones that will give them more features at a much lesser price.

We have already seen phones such as Asus Zenfone 5, Redmi Note 3G or the Redmi Note 4G and more recently the Yu Yureka offering better feature with a much lesser price tag. If Samsung is charging the premium for the brand name then it would be a futile effort to gain its lost glory and with such offerings Samsung can see more losses in its clientele and if it does not work out something exclusive from its shop floor it might cede its number one position to the all-time high Apple (AAPL, Financial) in the recent times and might find itself lagging behind even new comers like Xiaomi in the smartphone segment. In such an event it would be time to worry for the investors and patrons of Samsung.