Samsung is still the number one smartphone manufacturer in the world, but they’ll want to improve upon their financial results last year. The company’s profits took a significant dive in 2014 and Samsung is trying to change that and get back on the right track. The company has started using metal alongside plastic when designing their phones and have released the Galaxy Alpha last year, which was sort of a prototype phone. More phones followed this device and sported a rather similar build, like the Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy A3, A5 and A7. These three “A” devices are sort of Galaxy Alpha siblings and are Samsung’s attempt to regain the trust of the consumers.
We’ll focus on the Galaxy A5 in this article, a device which is already available in certain markets alongside the Galaxy A3. The Galaxy A5 is a solid mid-range handset, though its price could be lower in my humble opinion, it’s a solid device, more on its specs a bit later. Well, the Galaxy gold variant of the Galaxy A5 is now available in Vietnam, though not an official one. Vietnamese gold-plating shop, Karalux, gold-plated the device and is available for $610, which is $200 more expensive than the regular version of this handset. There are a bunch of images of this device in the gallery below this article, so check it out if you’re interested. A huge portion of the phone is plated with gold, as you can see in the images, only the areas where the antenna lays are not covered along with the ports and the display itself. Karalux even lets you put a custom design on the back of the phone, which is a nice touch. The device is way too expensive for me, but I guess there are people who are willing to spend an extra $200 to get something like this.
Samsung Galaxy A5 features a 5-inch 720p (1280 x 720) Super AMOLED display along with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of in-built storage which is expandable via MicroSD card up to 64GB. The device is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 SoC, a 64-bit quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz which ships with an Adreno 306 GPU. On the back of the device, you’ll find a 13-megapixel camera and an LED flash while there’s a 5-megapixel snapper on the front of the device. 2,300mAh battery comes with this device and it’s sealed in. Android 4.4 KitKat comes pre-installed on this handset on top of which you’ll find Samsung’s custom UI. The smartphone measures 139.3 x 69.7 x 6.7mm and weighs 123 grams.
