Samsung Galaxy Alpha review

There had been rumours that Samsung was planning to do a premium version of its Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, ditching the plastic build for a metal case. As it turns out, we didn't get a metal S5, but a completely new phone in its own right, the Samsung Galaxy Alpha. It's the first phone Samsung has announced to use the new metal case, although the design has subsequently rolled out to the upcoming Galaxy Note 4, too. It's a clear show of where Samsung wants to go, and how it wants to produce handsets that have the build quality to match the specs.

Build quality and design

It has to be said that Samsung's done a great job. It's the first handset from the company that we've picked up and immediately thought how good it feels. With a tougher body and the strip of aluminium running round the side, the Alpha certainly looks like a high-end smartphone. The front, as you'd expect, is a single sheet of Gorilla glass, protecting the screen and touch sensitive Back and Task switcher buttons. Around the bezel and under the glass is a patterned texture, which we think looks great and adds to the premium feel of the phone.

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Samsung hasn't made a metal rear for the Alpha, sticking with the dimpled soft-touch plastic it introduced with the S5. We don't mind this at all. First, the plastic is very grippy, making the phone feel secure in the hand. Secondly, the rear panel is removable, allowing Samsung to sell the phone in more colours (Charcoal Black, Scuba Blue, Frosted Gold, Sleek Silver and Dazzling White). More importantly, it also makes the battery user-replaceable.

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Impressively, Samsung has managed to make the phone super slim. At just 6.7mm thick, it's 0.2mm thinner than the iPhone 6. It's light, too, at just 115g. This makes the handset everything a good smartphone should be: thin, light and great to look at.

Screen size and quality

While Samsung has been known to put bigger-and-bigger screens in its top smartphones, the Galaxy Alpha is reassuringly a little bit smaller, with a 4.7in display. To us, this size makes a lot of sense, as it's comfortably big enough to see easily, yet it makes the phone small enough to slip into a pocket and carry around all day. It definitely feels like the right choice for the market Samsung is aiming the phone at.

With the smaller screen comes less resolution, as the Alpha only has a 1,280x720 Super AMOLED display. With a pixel density of 312ppi, the phone is slightly behind the identically-sized iPhone 6, which as a 326ppi screen. On paper that should mean that Apple's handset is a little sharper, but in practice you'd be hard-pushed to notice the difference.

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We think that Samsung's made the right resolution choice for this handset. Putting a Full HD display wouldn't have made the display any sharper, and you wouldn't fit any more on the screen either, unless you made everything too small to use. We're definitely past the point now where a smartphone's screen is about resolution, as the quality and sharpness mean a lot more.

Quality is something that this screen has in spades. We used our colour calibrator to test the phone's screen and were impressed with the results. It produced 100 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut and produced perfect blacks, meaning contrast is amazing. This was held-up by our subjective tests, which showed fine detail and vibrant colours in all of our test images. Brightness at 325cd/m2 isn't bad, although LCD displays tend to be a little bit brighter. Even so, we had no problems using the Alpha outside.

Performance and battery life

Samsung has fitted one of its octa-core Exynos 5 5430 SoC's in the Alpha. This has a main quad-core 1.8GHz processor for demanding applications and a power-saving 1.3GHz quad-core processor for when the phone's only required to do lightweight tasks. It's a quick CPU. Putting it through our usual tests, the Alpha completed the SunSpider JavaScript test in 457.4ms using the default Samsung browser. While the Galaxy S5 was a little quicker, completing the test in 391ms, there's very little in it.

Graphics performance was similarly as good, with the Alpha managing a high score of 17,271 (or 73.1fps) in the Ice Storm Unlimited test. Again, the S5 was slightly faster, but when the screen can only show 60fps anyway, any extra frames beyond this is unnecessary. Finally, we ran the Epic Citadel benchmark, where the handset managed 51.6fps at the phone's full resolution and using Ultra High Quality settings.

In order to keep the size of the phone down, Samsung has fitted a 1,860mAh battery, rather than the 2,800mAh batteries it uses in its bigger phones. This means slightly less battery life, although the 11h 31m we measured in our video playback tests means that the Alpha has enough juice for a full day's worth of use.

As with the S5, the Alpha has an Ultra Power Saving mode, which switches the handset to use a greyscale theme and restricts which apps can run. It can dramatically extend battery life, eking out the last few percentages of battery life on your phone. Of course, as we mentioned before, the back comes off, so you can replace the battery with a second, fully-charged one easily.

Camera

A 12-megapixel camera has been fitted, which is a slight step down from the 16-megapixel model in the Galaxy S5 on paper. In reality, there's hardly anything separating the two. With 12-megapixels, you've still got plenty of resolution and our shots outdoor looked great.

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They were well exposed and had plenty of detail in them, as you can see from the sample shot below (click to view fullscreen). In low light packing all of those pixels onto a relatively small sensor means that pictures can look a little noisy. However, resize them to screen size and you don't have much of a problem.

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The video mode is impressive, too, with the Alpha able to shoot 4K UHD video. At this resolution, everything looks incredibly sharp. Our one minor complaint is that the compression smooths out some of the finer detail, as you can see from the brickwork in the sample shot below (click to view fullscreen).

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Android and interface

Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) is installed, along with the usual Samsung customisations. These generally aren't too intrusive. We quite like the My Magazine home screen, which pulls in latest news and updates from your social networks. Some of the additions feel a little redundant now, though, such as S Voice, which essentially does the same job as Google voice commands.

Thanks to the powerful processor, the Alpha can handle the OS well, with smooth transitions and scrolling throughout. It even manages complex web pages well, with barely a stutter when scrolling through them.

Fingerprint reader

As with the S5, the Alpha has the same fingerprint reader built into the home button, which you use by swiping your finger or thumb across. With the Alpha you can register three individual fingers, plus for each finger you use you can add the corresponding thumbprint, too. In effect, you can register three fingers and both thumbs, for a total of five prints. The reader is extremely accurate and definitely the easiest and best way to unlock your handset. It can also be used to authenticate PayPal transactions.

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Heart rate monitor

On the back is a heart rate monitor, which records to the S Health app. It's pretty easy to use (you just put your finger on the sensor), but we wonder how often and how useful this really is to most people.

Storage

Pretty much every single Samsung Android phone that we've reviewed has had a microSD card slot, so that you can upgrade the base memory. With the Alpha that option is gone and you have to make do with the installed 32GB of storage. While a micrSD card would be nice, plenty of phones don't have this option and 32GB is plenty for most people. 

Conclusion

The Galaxy Alpha is a huge step forwards for Samsung and by far the best small handset that it's made, if not its best standard Android handset. Specs wise, the Galaxy S5 may win, but it's not far ahead in terms of performance or camera quality. In fact, we'd rather have the Alpha. Its better build quality and smaller body make it the more comfortable phone to carry around, while it's still extremely fast. It also gives Samsung a credible competitor to the iPhone 6, which is pretty much the same size. Ultimately, the Alpha turns Samsung from a manufacturer of tech-packed smartphones into a manufacturer of beautiful and desirable ones, too.

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