Samsung moved into the premium material world with the launch of their Galaxy A series phones, but they didn’t forget their plastic roots and launched the Galaxy E series along with them. The E series is a cheaper alternative to the A series’ more expensive look and feel with the design remaining the same but turning the hardware down a notch. The Galaxy E7 is an alternative to the Galaxy A7 and we shall see how different in terms of hardware they really are.

The E7 is targeted towards a more mid-range market but it is made to look exactly as the pricier A7. They’ve managed to deliver the look of the phone but not the feel with the use of plastic in the E7. The phone, also being a phablet, has a 5.5” Super AMOLED display at 720 x 1280 pixels, lower than the full HD resolution on the A7. This also results in a much lower pixel density in comparison as well. Both screens have the same protection in Corning Gorilla Glass 4 and have a microSD slot for expansion of storage over the internal 16GB. E7 also has a dual-sim variant.

The E7 is powered by a Snapdragon 410, falling short of the powerful Snapdragon 615 on the A7, and only has a single quad-core Cortex-A53 compared to the two on A7. It has an Adreno 306 graphics unit and 2 GBs of RAM. The A7, although, has a superior graphics unit but, like the E7, has just 2 GBs of RAM.

The cameras are quite similar as both have a 13 megapixels sensor, recording videos at 1080p (30 frames per second). The front is also the same with 5 megapixels dedicated for your selfie-needs. It is also capable of recording footage at 1080p resolution.

Although Samsung used plastic on the E7, they couldn’t make the battery removable in order to go for a sleeker look. However, they did manage to put a larger battery in the E7 at 2950 mAh which is good enough to give an average user about two days of use, compared to the 2600 mAh on the A7.