Samsung Galaxy J2 Pro

PROS:

• Decent screen and battery life
• Compact dimensions
• Above average front camera

CONS:

• Mediocre design
• Lack of ambient light and auto-brightness sensor
• Smart Glow isn't that effective
• Corning Gorilla Glass is absent

Display and Design:

The latest product by Samsung i.e, Galaxy J2 (2016) has been re-engineered and re-designed with respect to the 'Make for India' guidelines. Despite the competitiveness, it looks like the company has done nothing major in Galaxy J2 in terms of design as it looks the same old boring featuring a plastic design. The volume buttons are small and hard to press and despite of having a slippery back panel its quality again is very poor.

Just like with every Samsung product, J2 again comes with an AMOLED panel display which even though gives a vivid color display, but looks a bit unrealistic. Another factor that makes the display poor is the presence of auto-brightness sensor which makes it mandatory for the user to manually adjust the brightness level whenever one plans to go out.

Performance:

On the aspects of Performance too, this device is a big NO. The presence of Spreadtrum processor that operates on Cortex A7 cores sounds futile since A7 is a thing of the past. These days major smartphone maker giants prefer using 64-bit Cortex A53 as it being the latest is more efficient.

Just like the case with the AMOLED display, Samsung is using tad old GPU on its J2 product. As per the reports, Galaxy J2 (2016) comes with a little less powerful Mali-400 MP2 GPU which no wonder makes the UI laggy, applications take 2-3 seconds to load up. If you think this is it, sorry but it's not.

Camera:

The overall web browsing experience too is hell frustrating and even though the smartphone boasts of a 8-megapixel rear camera along with a front camera of 5-megapixels, on a rigorous testing, it portrayed a slow performance in focusing and clicking of images. The rear camera is above average and in well-lit situations, it produces sharp and vibrant images with vivid colors. In outdoor low light situations however, images lack detailing and have a noticeable amount of noise.

Battery:

As it happens with almost every Samsung product, the Galaxy J2 Pro too comes with a decent battery of 2600mAh, that gives an average performance. On a normal usage, the device can easily by pass one full day of use. However, on intensive usage, the battery sucks badly which gets further problematic with the time the device takes up for charging.

As reports indicate, J2 Pro takes a time span of nearly 3 hours for full-charging and even though it comes with ultra-power saving mode it hardly makes any impact on the overall battery usage.

VERDICT (7/10):

While it does have a few positives with a good display, front camera and battery life, the Galaxy J2 2016 compromises on too many factors. The internal hardware that features an 8GB of storage capacity, the all plastic build and the lack of an ambient light sensor make it a very low offering from a known brand Samsung.