Samsung has been hyping about a
metal phone and on August 13, 2014, the phone was unveiled, albeit
without much pomp and color. This is a new flagship phone from Samsung.
Its official launch is set for September 2014, although no precise date
has been given. It is, thus, projected to enter the Nigerian smartphone
market starting from late next month.
The Samsung Galaxy Alpha, unlike former Samsung handsets, comes with a
metal frame. The phone does not pack many surprising features.
Samsung has been facing severe competition from emerging phone makers
as well as from already established phone companies. It is, however,
hoped that the Galaxy Alpha is what Samsung needs to turn its fortunes
around.
The phone’s design is an obvious improvement from Galaxy S5. The
front and back has a dimpled texture, and the sides are ringed by a
metal band. It has beveled, well-polished chamfered edges with bottom
speaker holes similar to the iPhone’s.
The Galaxy Alpha has a 4.7inch display. Its resolution is 720 by 1280
pixels with 320ppi pixel density. The multi-touch capacitive
touchscreen is full HD Super AMOLED with 16M colors.
The primary camera is 12MP with a resolution of 4128 by 3096 pixels. It has autofocus and LED flash.
The camera app features dual camera, touch focus, HDR, panorama, face and smile detection and geo-tagging. The front camera is 2.1MP. The phone can capture video qualities of 2160p @ 30fps.
Samsung Galaxy Alpha has and Exynos 5 Octa 5430 chipset. Its
processor is a 1.8GHz Quad-core Cortex-A15. Its graphics is powered by
Mali-T628 MP6. The handset runs on a Samsung customized version of
Android v4.4.4 KitKat. It has a 2GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. The
space is, however, not expandable through external microSD cards.
The device also features a PayPal certified fingerprint sensor.
From the lack of fanfare in the unveiling ceremony, it is possible
that the manufacturer does not expect massive returns from the phone
sales. Many have, in fact, seen it as an experiment on metal-banded
handsets by the company.
