Samsung’s Galaxy Alpha is the company’s first recent experiment with metal construction, and the company seems to design hole-in-one in terms of design.
The Alpha feels solid but is also incredibly thin. It’s actually slimmer than the iPhone 6, the Oppo Finder, and the Alcatel OneTouch Idol X, measuring in at 6.7 mm. Contributing to that thin profile is the display, which the team over at iFixit have discovered is just 1.4 mm thick. That’s less than half of what the panel in the iPhone 6 measures.But the fact that it’s so thin (along with a generous helping of adhesive) makes the screen that much harder to replace.
The upside is that the screen is the first component out, so you don’t have to completely disassemble the phone to get at the display. The bad news is that with everything packed in so tight behind the display, you have to go through all that careful heating and prying to replace any other component, even if you don’t intend to replace the display. Not ideal, but the removable battery is really easy to access, so that’s something.
Display aside, the Galaxy Alpha packs a 4.7-inch 1280×720 pixel Super AMOLED display, a 2.5 GHz Snapdragon 801 SoC, 2 GB of RAM, 32 GB of internal storage, a 12MP camera, a 2MP camera up front, and an 1860 mAh battery. It launched on Bell and Virgin last Friday and is available in both black and white for $149.95 on a two-year contract. No term pricing is $699.95.
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