J5 and J7: Samsung's New Budget Phones

The 'affordable' segment in mobile phones has been seeing no end of action for the past two years. Samsung has been under increasing pressure from players like Xiaomi, Lenovo and Motorola, Asus, Gionee and a host of others.

While there are barely any phones that can compete with Samsung's current flagships, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, there are more than enough to crowd out Samsung's lower-end phones.

Today, after a year, Samsung has refreshed its J5 and J7 phones that come in at Rs 13,999 and 15,999. These are to be available from Flipkart tomorrow.

Some things that immediately stand out about the J5 and J7. There's an f1.9 camera lens on the 13 and 5MP cameras. As has been seen with the Galaxy S6 and Samsung phones launched after that, this is making a really big difference to the photography possible on the phone.

4G/LTE are now available on these two phones whereas they were missing with other phones about a year ago. There's a data offer with the phones of 30GB of data free.

Another thing is that there's a gold version of these devices where earlier the colour was reserved for just the top end phones.

The J5 is a 5.2-inch device with a 1280x720p display and the J7 is a 5.5-inch phone with a 1920x1080p display. Both phones are running the latest Android version out in the wild -- Marshmallow.

There are other specs that are also different on the J5 and J7, the J7 clearly being the it her end of the two. The J5 has a 1.2GHz quad-core and the J7 a 1.6GHz ccta-core processor. Storage for both is 16GB, expandable to 128GB. RAM. The J5's battery is a 3,100mAh and the J7's a 3,300mAh.

With Indian users retaining a strong loyalty for Samsung products, the conglomerate of Chinese players may just find they can't take their share of the pie for granted.