I am reassured that Samsung are not content with just releasing the Samsung Galaxy Alpha but have plans for what we believe to be three mid-range follow up handsets, the Galaxy A3, A5 and A7. Today’s story concerns the Samsung Galaxy A5, which we covered a week and a half ago. Now the Galaxy A5 has been through the FCC and shows that it’s passed Band 5 regulations, together with the “as expected” 2G and 3G networking, including DC-HSPA (the highest speed 3G technology) plus Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy, ensuring compatibility with a plethora of wearable devices. It also comes with dual-band WiFi. Unfortunately, the only carrier that appears to support LTE in band 5 is US Cellular; I don’t believe that Samsung are designing the A5 for just US Cellular but instead this is either one particular model and there are others, or it has only been tested at this band. We’ll know in due course when Samsung decide to unveil the A5.
As you might suppose from the above, we don’t yet have confirmation of the specification of the A5 but as I wrote in my introduction, we believe it will be a mid-range model based around a 720p 5.0-inch AMOLED screen, a 2,330 mAh battery and 16 GB of internal storage. It may or may not have a MicroSD card slot. We’re expecting a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 series processor under the skin, the rear camera to be a 13 MP model and like almost all other Samsung Android devices, it’ll run TouchWiz as the interface. What we still don’t know is what it’ll be made out of: will it be metal, plastic, a mix of the two or another exotic material? Given that the Galaxy Alpha’s distinguishing feature is the design, materials and construction, I don’t believe it’ll be built in the same way as the Galaxy S range, so that points towards at least partial metal construction.
To my mind, it’s about time Samsung decided to try their hand at a metal-built device that concentrates more on the design and build than having eye-bleeding specification. This may be Samsung finally admitting that high box specification numbers are for the most part completely irrelevant. Would I personally buy one? At this juncture, I would wait: I hope that a mid range device in six months will offer a newer generation 64-bit processor and Android L and this should offer better battery life. Perhaps 2,330 mAh is enough juice for a day, perhaps not but for the sake of a few months my money would be on waiting it out. Meanwhile, check out SamMobile’s exclusive pictures of the leaked A5.
