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Tecno Boom J7: Music all day, everyday

Tecno maintains its well-known affordability status on the Boom J7, with a lot more that will surprise any smartphone critic out there.

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Introduction.

The Tecno Boom J7 is a mid-range smartphone from one of the most popular mobile phone brands to enter the Nigerian market in recent years. The Boom J7 is Tecno’s first purpose-built music smartphone and it is aimed at a music-centric, hip and seemingly youthful market.

Tecno also maintains its well-known affordability status on the Boom J7, with a lot more that will surprise any smartphone critic out there.

Unboxing.

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From the Boom J7 box, it is obvious that Tecno really paid attention to styling with this phone.  Granted, they could have done more than just “It’s Boom Time” staring at you from the front of the box but overall, it is a big step in the right direction. One very lovely part of the phones packaging, however, is the graffiti-like artwork running along the edges of the phone pack embossed in black.

When you open the box, the first thing you see is the Boom J7 smartphone itself in a rich looking purple shade. After that first layer (i.e the phone itself), are the two protective cases that come out-of-the-box (the ones in this particular box were blue and grey with the same kind of graffiti-esque artwork found on the box engraved on them). In the last layer are two white boxes, one containing the Boom J7 manual, a 13 month warranty card, a palmchat flyer and the really hyped all-metal earphones in a leather pouch. The other box contained the travel charger with a detached USB cable which can be plugged into the charger.

Design and Build Quality.

From the box to the phone, the protective cases, the earphones and even the phone software, Tecno has hit the mark with the design of this phone. The phone itself comes in a rich purple shade and feels well put together with a curved back that makes it fit better in the hand, with subtle touches of red around the camera on the back and the phones speaker.

The volume buttons are on the left side of the phone, the screen lock/Power button on the right, the charger port on the bottom left of the phone and the earpiece port on the top right of the phone. The cases are effective with engraved artwork on them and the all-metal earphone comes in red. To put it in other words, the Tecno boom J7 is a very good looking phone and its accessories make it look even better. Kudos to Tecno in this aspect.

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As far as build quality goes, Tecno didn’t do anything revolutionary with the Boom J7 but they did enough. The phone feels sturdy and well made, and the plastic materials feel like brushed aluminium to the touch. However, the back cover that shields the battery and insides of the phone is made of very thin plastic, light, bendy and doesn’t really inspire much confidence. The matte finish is good and isn’t easily susceptible to scratches but you’ll most likely want to use those protective cases so you don’t feel the tackiness of the rear cover.

All in all, this isn’t a bad phone to look at all and it’s well made as well. Compared to other more expensive phones in its segment like the Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime, the Tecno Boom J7 will hold its own with its emotive styling.

Hardware (Display, Battery Life).

The Tecno Boom J7 has a 5-inch HD display with a 720x1080 display and 320 DPI that is clear and very sharp. The screen brightness is good enough for everyday use both indoors and outdoors but I found it quite difficult to see anything on the screen when the screen brightness is set a bit low, indoors or outdoors.

The battery is the Boom J7’s greatest shortcoming. It is equipped with a 2020mAh battery that is abysmal to put it lightly. For a ‘music’ phone I expected Tecno to have done better with this device. The battery on the Boom J7 was so bad, that it didn’t last a journey from Mile 2 to Lekki when I used it to listen to music on a 34% charge using earphones. I could only squeeze out 5 hours on 3G and 10 hours on 2G, although if you switch it to 3G only when you need it, you could get more. However, with constant use of 3G, or 2G and music, the device was brought to its very knees, which means you’ll most likely need a power bank to get through the entire day or set reminders for when you need to use 3G or not.

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Home UI (Home Screen, App Drawer, Notifications Pane).

The UI on the Boom J7 is refreshing and good to look at. I like the design and the fact that it’s not too cumbersome to use and understand. The default home screen is a bit cluttered with too many information widgets across the three panes but you can de-clutter it so that shouldn’t be an issue. The app icons are large enough and the designs of the other icons on the phone are almost futuristic. The app drawer is on the center of the screen between the phone icon and contacts icon on one side, and the messages and browser icon on the other.

Swiping down from the top of the phone reveals the main notifications pane where your notifications can be viewed while holding the circular home button at the bottom of the screen between two dots that serve as the back and multi-window buttons, reveals the lesser notifications pane. It must be said that the design of both the main and lesser notifications pane is heavily based on the same notifications pane that can be found on the iPhone 4s and subsequent iPhones.

Performance.

The Boom J7 comes with a 1.3 GHz MediaTek quad core processor with 1GB RAM and 16GB ROM, although only about 11GB of that is available. As far as daily usage is concerned, the Tecno Boom J7 does surprisingly well. It functions well most of the time and doesn’t hang as much.

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The capacitive touch screen doesn’t recognize touch sometimes but that isn’t easily noticeable. Also, the gesture controls are a wonderful and fun addition to the Boom J7’s functionalities – writing “C” while the screen is asleep wakes the phone and opens the camera instantly, same goes for ‘M’ which opens the music player and so on, but I noticed tapping the screen twice doesn’t always wake up the phone.

The Boom J7 also doesn’t get too hot after extended use and the apps are quite responsive, but take a few seconds to open after tapping the icons. That isn’t a fault considering the specs of the phone. All in all, the Tecno Boom J7 performs well for its styling and price, compared to other devices in its class.

Text Input.

Text input is via a pre-installed swiftkey keyboard and it works quite well although the predictive text is a disaster. The buttons are spaced well enough and the keyboard is highly customizable. You can change the layout of the keyboard, with options for two-handed use, thumb only, and one-handed use.

Gallery, Video Player, Audio Player, Audio Output.

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The gallery on the Boom J7 is very much like that on the iPhone 4s, 5 and 6. Pictures and videos are arranged chronologically and customizable, by day, month, year and so on. This makes it easy to use and view pictures and videos without hassle.

The video player plays most kinds of videos but not all formats. The Boom J7 comes with two pre-installed audio players – the usual Tecno audio player and the Boom player (Tecno’s version of Google’s Play).

The audio player is pretty good but has a tendency to skip songs at it's own discretion and couldn’t play some audio formats. Again, I take issue with this because if this phone is a ‘music’ phone, it should be able to play all songs in whatever format they may come, or all of the popular formats at least. Apart from that, the Tecno audio player works well and the layout is good with a very nice equalizer setup, although some functions of the equalizer don’t work unless the earphones are plugged in.

As for the Boom Player, I think it’s a very innovative app from Tecno. You can stream music online, download and also interact with an online Boom Player community. However, the content on the Boom player is quite thin so there isn’t much to do with it. I like the way it is setup and the very interesting ‘Mood’ feature that automatically selects songs to play that fits a certain mood, but Tecno should work on getting more artistes and labels on board to have richer content.

Camera (Photos, Video).

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The Boom J7 sports an 8MP rear camera and a 2MP front camera. The front camera is not very good, there is too much noise and generally it just takes bad pictures. The rear camera is much better however and the autofocus is very good.

The 8MP takes very good, clear and bright pictures under normal lighting conditions but is just like the 2MP front camera under low light. The pictures are grainy and there is too much noise. I think an 8MP camera should better that the Boom J7’s camera under low light. Video recording isn’t great but it should be satisfactory to the average user.

Web Browser and other pre-installed apps.

The default browser works fine and provides multi-tab function. Google Chrome doesn’t come pre-installed though, you get Opera Mini instead. Other apps that come pre-installed include BBM, Whatsapp, Facebook, Palmchat, Palmplay (Tecno’s version of the Google Play Store), OLX, UC Mini browser, Uber Sync for Facebook, DU Speed Booster, Flash Share, Google Maps, Google Play Store, and a couple of games which are all in demo version.

There is also a very interesting HotKnot feature that lets you transfer files by touching screens with another HotKnot enabled phone, which unfortunately, is limited to only Tecno phones. The Boom J7 also has screen mirroring capabilities so you can watch videos from the phone on your smart TV.

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Conclusion.

For a mid-range smartphone, the Tecno Boom J7 is a very good phone. Apart from the incompetent battery, the grainy camera, and the fact that the audio player doesn’t support quite a number of audio formats, there really isn’t much wrong with this phone. The Tecno Boom J7 offers a very wide range of functionality for a phone that costs about N25, 000.

The UI is good to look at, the styling is superb and the earphones are rivaled only by the Apple earpod, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and S6 earphone, and some Skullcandy earphones. Tecno says the Boom J7 has two different amplifiers (one for the speaker and one for the earphones) but the speaker could be louder and some functions on the equalizer won’ t function if the earpiece isn’t plugged in. Also, the music player sound is so low, that you have to increase the volume to almost the highest bar to enjoy the earphones.

All in all, I think anyone getting the Boom J7 would be getting more value for money. To put this in perspective, you would get better value for money by buying a Tecno Boom J7 rather than a Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime, which has basically the same specs but is way more expensive. Tecno has indeed come a long way from when they used to be referred to as ‘Chinko’ phones.

Do you think there are any other phones that offer more value for money than the Boom J7? Let us know in the comments section below.

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