Samsung Galaxy J3 (2018)

The famed premium-phone producer, Samsung, tries its hand in the budget market with the Samsung Galaxy J3. Priced at ₹ 6,490, the phone looks cheap and comes with dated functioning too.

The Samsung Galaxy J3 can touch your nostalgic spot with its removable battery and headphone jack. However, other than that, the phone does not deliver any decent specifications. It has poor performance, terrible low-light cameras and a display that fails to keep color accuracy. It is not a phone suitable for purchase, even if you are starting as a new smartphone user.

The Galaxy J3 does not have a lovely design. At 152g, the phone is quite light and easy to handle. It can sit comfortably in your hand. However, it has nothing that attracts the eye. It looks quite ordinary and comes with a plastic body which makes it less rigid. The phone retains the headphone jack, and the speakers are embedded on one side. Unlike modern phones, it does not come with the USB Type-C port but the MicroUSB port. On top of that, it does not come with waterproofing. Overall, the phone does not have a sturdy construction and is not a looker in any way. An impressive feature is that it has a removable battery, so you can replace it if the battery gets shot.

The phone comes with 5-inch IPS OLED display with an aspect ratio of 16:9. The colors appear quite washed out, and the brightness is just passable. Under harsh sunlight, the visibility takes a drop. While 720p is expected from a budget phone, however, at the price tag, there are phones which comes with a higher resolution of 1080p. Plus, the phone comes with huge bezels that limit the screen space to work with. You will not be able to immerse yourself in a movie or a game with this display, though it is excellent for regular use. However, it does not have auto-brightness, which is a shortcoming.

Samsung Galaxy J3 comes with Exynos 7 processor which is Samsung own processor. The phone turns out to be a very slow one. App loading is quite slow, and if you are using multiple apps, the phone might freeze. The gaming performance on this phone is quite poor. High-end games will not run at high, and even at its lowest setting, the frame rate drops to 30fps. Casual games can run fine, but there are occasional choppy frame rates observed. It is also slow to return to the home screen as well as executing simple tasks like opening the camera application.

Samsung Galaxy J3 arrives with a single 8MP primary rear camera. The camera is passable. When there is ample light, the pictures are just decent.

The colors appear washed out, and the finer details get muddled, in both indoor and outdoor settings. In low light, the camera performance plummets with dim objects getting blackened and the details getting washed out completely. On top of that, the pictures appear quite grainy.

The 5MP front camera is just fine and can click decent pictures. In ample lights, it performs better by capturing essential details of your face. Again, in low light, the selfie camera struggles, producing selfies which lack definition.

The Samsung Galaxy J3 has a removable 2,600 mAh battery. It is quite decent for an entry-level phone. Streaming a video over WiFi for about an hour saw that it dropped 12% of its charge which is not bad. On an average, it gets around 13 hours and 37 minutes of runtime against the 15 hours and 16 minutes that you get from Moto G6 Play. However, in real time, the phone drains a lot of juice. One of the reasons can be the lack of auto-brightness, which keeps the phone brighter than necessary even when the battery is going down. The battery is not enough to keep your phone running through the day as you would require a bit of extra charge before going to bed. On the plus side, the phone does not heat up so, and your internals remains secure.

Despite coming at a budget range, the phone has a lot of shortcomings which has been tackled by cheaper phones of other companies. It struggles in terms of performance and has a passable set of cameras as well. The only good thing about the phone is its 16:9 display, but the bad outweighs the good. It is not a recommended phone. The Moto G6 Play is a better phone to go for in the similar range due to its better battery and superior camera.