The Samsung Galaxy Alpha is still available on preorder in the United Kingdom (United for how long we don’t know!) The Alpha will be available to purchase and place in your pocket tomorrow, but what is it, where does it fit in the Samsung Galaxy range, is it an upgrade to the Samsung Galaxy S5 how does it compare and is it a phone Samsung have taken seriously? How many people understand and know the answer to these questions? After reading this article if your one of the people asking or even answering these questions hopefully you’ll have a better idea of what the Alpha is all about!
The Design of the Samsung Galaxy Alpha is its main attraction it’s Samsung ‘letting go’ and making a smartphone of premium material design build. The S5, S4 and the Samsung Galaxy S3 have all been light plastic shell coated handsets. Nobody has really complained about this it keeps the weight down appeals to the costs and design Samsung then could have remained silent with a laissez faire in’t broken dont fix it attitude instead they could see an iPhone six on the horizon and they thought they should at least try and do something about it. The Alpha is the result made to do battle with the iPhone Range and at 4.7 inches remarkably cornered similar on the edges!
This suggest that the Samsung Galaxy Alpha is aimed at someone who doesn’t know what to pick between a Samsung or an iPhone hovering between both brands. Samsung no doubt did the market research and realised if they didn’t include a premium quality metallic handset in their range people would just buy one from elseware! Like Apple! Which is why initially the Alpha was pushed as the preemptive alternative to the recently announced iPhone 6! The Alpha is Samsungs handset to stop their customers jumping flagships and landing in the Apple Cart! Is it necessary is it a smart move and is it really good enough to do that?
The design is no doubt excellent to look at cool to touch and only 6.7mm thick the thinnest smartphone Samsung has ever built! Add to that the premium metallic frame and you have yourself the most expensive build quality handset Samsung has ever produced! Thats a FACT! Take a look underneath the hood and there’s another new feature! The on board processor clocking and clicking away is the Xynos 5430 an octa-core processor! This means its equipped with eight cores arms and legs! Instead of the Samsung Galaxy S5 and industry standard flagship quad core models which could and does sounds deceptively true!
It doesn’t mean it uses all the processing power it has available all the time! With four high proformence 1.8 GHz and four 1.3 Ghz processors that will only activate when lesser tasks and processing power is needed. The Alpha is cut and mix in the way it picks and optimises its octo core system to best deal and calculate with the task at hand most efficiently and precisely to save power! With a lesser screen resolution then the S5 ( 5.1 inches @ 1080 x 1912 ) the Alpha at 4.7 inches 720 x 1280 pixels has been reported to work better then the latter for higher powered graphical gaming which basically means you’ll clock more frames per second at a lower resolution giving overall smoother experience with only a slight trade off in pixels, colour and shade. Both the S5 and Alpha run on 2GB of RAM so at least no difference between the two there!
The Alpha has 32GB of on board storage memory with no SD extention card slot, if you think you’ll exceed 32GB then at some point you’ll have start juggling storage data. On the other hand the Samsung Galaxy S5 offers 16 to 32GB of memory with the added advantage of making use of the 128 gigabyte SD card slot! The Camera on the Alpha is the lesser when compared as well, the SGS5 has a 16MP primary camera capturing images at 5312 x 2988 pixels, the Alpha 4608 x 4692 at 12MP both phones record at 2160 pixels at 30fps, 1080 pixels at 60fps and 720 pixels at 120fps! Sharing the standard autofocus and LED flash along with geo-tagging, HDR, touch focus and face and smile detection. The S5 comes with a few extra goodies including duel shot video so you can use it for one to one face to face calls yet the main missing pieces coveted by the Alpha would have to be this and image stabilisation, HD video recording would have been a generous bonus!
So to summarise, ask yourself do you really need 128GB? The Alpha isn’t water resistant either, again, do you really need your phone to be resistant to water? Do you need to talk and record with a duel shot camera? If the answer to all these questions is a flat out Scottish independent “NO” and if you prefer a smaller compact metallic unique handset from Samsung then the Samsung Galaxy Alpha would be for you! Pick one up from o2 FREE with no upfront fee or get one on super fast 4GEE With EE!