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Samsung Galaxy Alpha review: a direct iPhone 6 competitor

10 years ago | Posted in: Business, USA, World | 2142 Views

Samsung’s new Galaxy Alpha Android smartphone finally demonstrates that the South Korean giant can do high-quality design and fantastic build quality, and begs the question why wait till now to do it.

The 4.7in Galaxy Alpha the smallest flagship smartphone in Samsung’s large range of devices. It sits under the 5.1in Galaxy S5 as the “design” smartphone, for people who want a smaller, better designed smartphone that doesn’t have to have all the latest technology packed in. Or at least that’s how Samsung puts it.

In reality it’s the first of a range of Samsung smartphones with metal bodies created in response to criticism over its plastic construction. The second metal smartphone will be the 5.7in Galaxy Note 4, due for release at the end of September or early October.

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Premium design, build and feel
The Galaxy Alpha is both the most attractive smartphone Samsung has ever made, and the best built. The metal sides with chamfered edges feel great in the hand, and the plastic back has a soft-touch quality to it feeling a bit like a cat’s ear in texture.

It’s also very light at 114g – that’s 2g heavier than the 112g iPhone 5S, 15g lighter than the iPhone 6 and 31g lighter than the 145g Galaxy S5. It is solidly built with no give or twist in the body at all.

The smaller size of the phone compared to the majority of 5in flagship Android and Windows Phone smartphones makes it much easier to hold and use in one hand.

The 4.7in screen is colour rich and vibrant with good contrast and wide viewing angles. It has a 720p resolution resulting in a pixel density of 312 pixels per inch (ppi). While it is certainly sharp for reading text and viewing photos, it is noticeably less crisp than the Galaxy S5’s 5.1in 1080p screen with 432 ppi. For comparison the iPhone 5S has a 4in 326ppi screen and the incoming iPhone 6 a 4.7in 326ppi screen.

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Specifications
Screen: 4.7in 720p Super AMOLED
Processor: Samsung Exynos 5 octa-core processor
RAM: 2GB of RAM
Storage: 32GB
Operating system: Android 4.4.4 “Kitkat”
Camera: 12MP rear camera, 2.1MP front-facing camera
Connectivity: LTE, Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0 with BLE, USB 2.0 and GPS
Dimensions: 132.4 x 65.5 x 6.7mm
Weight: 114g

Eight cores of power
The Alpha uses Samsung’s Exynos 5 octa-core processor, which has four low-power cores combined with four more powerful cores. Only four cores are used at any one time, with the lower power cores used until something demanding like playing a game or producing video is required to save battery.

The phone feels snappy, apps load instantly with no hint of lag and it handled blasting through graphically intensive games like Asphalt 8 without issue.

The Alpha has a smaller 1,860 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery than Samsung’s other flagship phones with batteries larger than 2,800mAh. The battery lasts about one day of solid use, with constant push email, three hours of listening to music over Bluetooth, two hours of browsing and 30 minutes of playing games. It will have to be charged every night, however. The Galaxy S5 with the 2,800mAh battery can last a day and half without a charge under similar usage.

Samsung’s Ultra Power Saving mode, which was praised in the Galaxy S5, works well, shutting down features, turning the screen black and white and limiting the number of apps available to a small handful, dramatically extending the battery life by days, with 10% battery listing around 24 hours of standby.

Unlike most other Samsung phones the Alpha has 32GB of built-in storage for apps, games, music, photos and movies, but no microSD card slot for further expansion.

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source: theguardian.com

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