My immediate worry about the Galaxy Alpha was that its 1,860mAh battery would be insufficient to handle the strains of a proper smartphone's day on the job. Perhaps I was being too pessimistic, because the Alpha ended up consistently lasting through a day's use, though rarely with much left to spare. Most of my time with the Alpha has been spent with the phone idly collecting notifications and syncing services like Gmail and Twitter, but the couple of days where I used it extensively — including shooting photos and videos and navigating with Maps — it still held up from morning till night. That's a positive surprise given its comparatively small battery, but it doesn't exactly cast the Alpha as a leader among its peers. The Xperia Z3 Compact is slightly thicker but otherwise the same size and it pretty much doubles the Galaxy Alpha's battery life while also being significantly cheaper.
The Alpha's packed full of wireless radios, as is Samsung's wont, including NFC, GPS, Bluetooth, and multiple LTE bands. They all performed reliably during my time with the phone. Considering the thinness of this device, I'm also impressed by its integrated loudspeaker, which produces good, clear sound. I'm quite content listening to music from the Alpha even when I have alternative speakers or earphones around.
As to the actual speed of the Alpha in day-to-day use, it's very much a repeat of the Galaxy S5. It does most tasks competently and swiftly. With the maturation of Android and the standardization around Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 processor this year, it's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between flagship phones on speed alone. I'm never left feeling like the Alpha's processor or memory are holding me back or delaying anything unduly, though the same can't be said for Samsung's software.
The hardware won't hold you back, but the software willThe notifications window is encumbered with so many toggles, settings, and shortcuts that there's precious little room for the actual notifications. This is a bigger issue on the Alpha's more compact display than it is on the Galaxy S or Galaxy Note. I'm also growing tired of having to spend the first 10 percent of a smartphone's battery life on just disabling unnecessary cosmetic additions like Samsung's My Magazine news aggregator. What's wrong with just giving people a clean slate of Android to customize to their choosing?
As much effort and time as Samsung has poured into delivering a distinctly Samsung user experience on its Android devices, there's just nothing I see in the Alpha's software that makes me want to recommend it ahead of the likes of Motorola, HTC, or Sony. The onscreen keyboard has an extra row of numbers, but its predictive algorithms aren't great so I swapped it for Google's Keyboard. Yes, the one that tracks everything I type. Samsung could have at least saved me from giving Google yet more personal information.
Even the hardware additions that depend on software don't thrill me. I tried using the fingerprint sensor embedded in the home button as my unlocking mechanism. It works, but you need superhuman patience to keep using it. The sensor has to be swiped just the right way, resulting in a bunch of failed unlocks, and even when successful, there's an extra bit of delay before it lets you into your home screen (relative to a pattern unlock), so it ultimately just frustrated me into not using it.
Android is still my operating system of choice. I'm too much of a Gmail and Chrome addict to consider other platforms, and the moment the Galaxy Alpha was announced, I knew there'd be a handsome alternative to the incoming iPhone to help me resist the iOS urge. As my colleague Dan Seifert puts it, the Galaxy Alpha is a one-hand wonder. It's sized just right, and it's so light and tactile that it makes almost everything you do on it feel kind of joyful. The improvement in its construction and feel brought about by that simple metal frame cannot be overstated. Where there once was chrome, now there is class.
Samsung has corrected some major foibles from its past and engineered an impressively capable phone for such an ultra-thin, style-centric device. But the Alpha ultimately starts to feel like a cramped apartment: the battery and speaker may do more than one would expect from their size, but just making them bigger would also have made them better.
The issue for Samsung is how it'll convince people to spend their money on the Galaxy Alpha instead of some seriously compelling competition. In the US, the Alpha is going directly up against the iPhone 6, which is about as tough a fight as you can imagine until you look at its pricing in Europe. The Galaxy Alpha costs as much as the Xperia Z3, which has a better camera, display, and battery while also being waterproof. And then there's the Z3 Compact, which has all those things and costs less.
The Galaxy Alpha is an unusual device for Samsung that augurs well for the future. It combines most of the good things about the Galaxy S5 with the metallic allure of recent competitors from HTC and Apple. It's beautiful. Now Samsung needs to make sure that it's practical too.
Photography by Sean O'Kane
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