What is the Samsung Galaxy Alpha?

What is the Samsung Galaxy Alpha?

The Samsung Galaxy Alpha is the Korean company's first metal phone. Unlike the HTC One M8 or the HTC One Mini 2, it's not totally metal-bodied, but it's a welcome step away from Samsung's usual plastic and towards more high-end luxury.

Nestling snugly between the S5 Mini and the flagship Galaxy S5 in Samsung's smartphone line-up, the 4.7-inch Alpha costs the same as the iPhone 6 and clearly hopes to take a bite out of Apple's sales.

This is an excellent 'small' Android handset in its own right, but we can't help feeling disappointed that it doesn't differentiate from the larger S5 in much more than the premium design.

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Watch our Samsung Galaxy Alpha video review

Samsung Galaxy Alpha – Design

Inevitably the metal frame is the major talking point here, but it’s the weight – or lack of it – that really makes the strongest first impression. It weighs just 115g, making it lighter than the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 (129g), the S5 Mini (120g) and only slightly heavier than the iPhone 5S (112g). That has a lot to do with the fact that there's still plenty of plastic to balance out the more expensive materials.

Samsung still uses a dimpled soft-touch back, although the dotted pattern's more discreet and softer than it is on the S5 and the S5 Mini. Here's where you'll find the heart-rate sensor, next to a 12-megapixel camera and LED flash.

Up front, the bezel around the sides of the screen is nice and slim, while the dotted theme from the back continues quite prominently on the front. You might not notice it, but we couldn't help feeling it was slightly naff and would've been better left plain. The home button with its metal trim is a familiar sight and also supports the fingerprint-recognition technology that was first introduced on the S5.

The Galaxy Alpha alongside the HTC One Mini 2

And so to the metal. Samsung uses an aluminium frame around the edges of the Alpha, including the buttons and volume rocker, replacing the usual faux-metal plastic trim. It's difficult not to immediately think of the iPhone when you get your hands on it. The metal has a cold, flat feel with an anodised finish to give it a similar metallic sheen to Apple's smartphone. The corners are gently raised to help gripping it in landscape mode, and it really does the trick of making this a much more attractive phone.

The problem, however, is that there’s still a great deal of plastic here, and next to HTC’s metal phones it's not really in the same league. It's a lovely handset to grip, though, and 4.7 inches appears to be the magic number for a so-called ‘smaller’ phone. In that respect, the Alpha is more manageable in one hand, although the corners can dig in ever so slightly.

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The comparisons with the iPhone don’t end there. The volume rocker is on the left edge and the speaker is on the bottom edge next to the micro-USB charging port. Like the S5 Mini, the Galaxy Alpha misses out on USB 3.0 support.

The Alpha is just 6.7mm thick, so it’s a slim phone as well, but it's not water- and dust-resistant like the S5 and the S5 Mini.

The back is still removable, as is the smaller-capacity battery, although there’s no microSD card slot, and now you’ll need a nano-SIM. It’s those kinds of design inconsistencies across the Galaxy phones that can be really frustrating at times, though in this case it does make it easier to switch from an iPhone, which was perhaps Samsung's aim.

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Samsung Galaxy Alpha – Screen

The Galaxy Alpha features a 4.7-inch 720p HD screen, so it doesn’t match the S5’s Full HD screen resolution and has more in common with the 4.5-inch S5 Mini. The 312ppi pixel density is short of the 326ppi squeezed of the S5 Mini, though the difference is negligible and it's about the same as the iPhone 6.

Samsung still employs a Super AMOLED panel with the same PenTile array, which, as explained in our S5 Mini review, can lead to some fuzziness up close. You can still expect an exceptionally bright screen with impressively deep blacks, though colours and contrast tend to look more erratic on the Alpha.

Running a video comparison next to the S5 and the S5 Mini, the Alpha still delivers a sharp 720p HD display, with good brightness and sharp, detailed images. The differences with the 1080p screen on the S5 are more noticeable. The faces in the episode of Justified we watched showed more detail, with more natural colours. Colours are more accurate and richer on the S5. The differences between the S5 Mini aren't so apparent, and there's very little to choose between the two smaller Samsung phones.

This is a solid-performing 720p HD screen on the whole. It’s just a shame Samsung didn’t give it the same Full HD treatment as the Galaxy S5, especially when you consider the difference in price.
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