Capping of a magnificent year for Samsung, the company has turned its attention to the budget side of things through the release of the J3 Emerge. While we’ve always had our reservations about Samsung’s lower-end smartphones, the J3 Emerge might be the turning point for them.

Build quality and display

The J3 Emerge, like the 2016 A series features a different design to what we’re used to seeing from Samsung. Though the front panel features a typical Samsung design, the back panel features a strip of metal running through the back panel’s upper half with the primary camera and LED flash peacefully residing on it. Its build is finely polished and mimics metal to near perfection while its dimensions may not be the smartphone’s best traits.

The front panel features a 5.0 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with 294ppi pixel density. This translates to a satisfying 720p resolution, which most smartphones within these price brackets tend to ditch altogether. So, we’re quite happy with what we’re seeing from the J3 Emerge.

Cameras

The cameras come in with a satisfactory weight on the Galaxy J3 Emerge. The primary camera houses a 5 megapixel sensor with LED flash and customary features that include geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection and HDR leading to the smartphone producing fine photography whereas the front camera brags off a 2 megapixel sensor that is finely suited to produce normal shots.

Hardware and Software

An Octa-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53 processor and 2GB of RAM highlight its main hardware specifications with its internal storage banking at 16 gigs. The external card slot does allow you to beef up the storage capacity but we’d recommend using a smaller SD card as the processor and RAM look inadequate to smoothly cater for the hectic demands of the built-in Android v6.0.1 Marshmallow.

No other features such as USB type-C, fast charge or a fingerprint scanner present while the smartphone will only be marketed in grey color scheme. A large removable 2600 mAh battery resides underneath the smartphone’s plastic back panel which allows you to replace a degraded battery. That’ll be all the J3 Emerge is about.