Lollipop is the buzzword for many Android fans so far this year, with many promised and arriving updates. Nexus owners have had the update, at earliest, since early November in 2014, with more OTA updates rolling as the days and hours pass while the factory images sit proudly on the Developer pages for the brave of heart. LG has the LG G3 to cater to while HTC has both the One M7 from 2013 and the One M8 from 2014. With the former getting the 5.0.2 update as a rumored ‘termination of support’ update. LG has the G3, possibly the G2 and original G Flex, and we will hopefully, see those by the time that some of the CES’s goodies will be arriving in stores. Meanwhile, Samsung and its fleet of smartphones, from low-range to high-spec have been apparently working on a few interesting things with Lollipop.
Previously, we had reported that Samsung would be targeting Lollipop to hit the Galaxy S5, not the more recently-released Note 4 and Note Edge phones from 2014, as early as possible, likely due to high adoption rates of the S5 over the Note 4, especially considering how two-year agreements released Galaxy S III owners about the time the S5 went on sale to the public. But today we follow the trek of the Galaxy Alpha, the once secretive luxury-line device that Samsung announced internationally, then to AT&T here in the United States.
The Galaxy Alpha, for those who might not have their spec sheets on hand, had a 4.7-inch 720p AMOLED display panel, a 1860 mAh battery, powered by the Exynos 5430 true octa-core processor, with 2 GB of RAM and 32 gigabytes of internal storage with no Micro SD card slot. This phone had rather unimpressive specifications, but that was kind of the point. It was the South Korean manufacturer’s first foray into the realm of aluminum construction. The Alpha featured the first lack of an SD card slot on a modern Samsung smartphone, as well as the first metal on the device, outside of the metal inner frame on all their phones. The point is that this phone was not high in specs, it was high in style. Now, it’s looking to get high in version number too as Android 5.0.2 has been shown by SamMobile’s Twitter account running on this guy.
Specifically, the model shown with the test-phase build of Android 5.0.2 Lollipop is the SM-G850F European variant of the metal semi-flagship. The good news is that SamMobile is usually pretty spot on with the leaks they push out. While the bad news is that U.S. customers will have to wait for AT&T to rummage through, remove useful functionality (yes, I’m referring to you, LG G3 notification drawer brightness slider…), and generally bloat up the system. Not to mention, Samsung will take its sweet time releasing this one, since its for a more minor device, compared to the Note and S Galaxy families. The takeaway is that the Galaxy Alpha has not and likely will not be neglected by Samsung, who has previously helped the Galaxy S III receive Android 4.4.2 Kit Kat, more than two years after it was released and get the Note II running Lollipop sometime this year. With all that in mind, do you think that more Alpha-like devices will be on the way? Do you happen to be a Galaxy Alpha owner currently, eagerly awaiting the update, or do you not really care that much about the Lollipop hype-train these days? Which Samsung phone do you think will get the Lollipop go-ahead next? Let us know down below.
