The Galaxy A5 is the first device to be launched in Samsung’s Galaxy Alpha inspired series. In response to increasing demand for premium metal phones, Samsung thought that the Galaxy A3, Galaxy A5 and Galaxy A7 would present themselves as great new designs that would entice customers. While the Galaxy Alpha was launched to good reviews, it is still considered much too expensive for the specs it is touting. The Galaxy A5, on the other hand, is a step up in design from the company and is the first phone from Samsung sporting a metal unibody, as seen on iPhones in the past years.
The Galaxy A5, as well as its brothers, the A3 and A7, were announced back in October and Samsung finally decided that the time has come to start commercializing the new phones. The Galaxy A5 is the first to hit stores in China, but should end up being sold in other regions as well, soon. Chinese customers can get their hands on the white Galaxy A5 for about $420, which is fairly reasonable considering the specs the handset is touting.
The Galaxy A5 specs include a 5 inch Super AMOLED display with a 720*1280 resolution and 294 ppi pixel density. The phone is powered by a Snapdragon 410 CPU, backed by an Adreno 306 GPU, 2 GB RAM and 16 GB internal storage, with a microSD card slot available. The Galaxy A5 camera includes a pretty nifty 13 MP camera on the rear, with LED flash and autofocus and a 5 MP front camera for your selfie needs. The battery on the thing is also pretty big, although it could have been bigger, measuring 2300 mAH. The highlight of the release is its metal design, though, which is aimed at younger crowds who are momentarily into the premium feel of metal in their hands.
Not to say that the Galaxy A5 price is a bit overboard, the handset specs aren’t anything to write home about and the display could have been made a bit better. Considering that the Galaxy A5 is actually pretty expensive compared to similarly specced phones, we can clearly deduce that Samsung is betting on design and premium materials to sell this handset. Do you think that the metal unibody is worth the $420 price tag? If you add in the pretty good camera setup, we do get a pretty comprehensive, 64 bit enabled device which should end up getting updated to Android 5.0 Lollipop next year, so it wouldn’t be a bad investment.