Trouble for Samsung Galaxy S5 Owners in SA, S5s with T-Mobile Start Receiving Android 5.1.1 Update in the US, More Details

After its release in the spring of 2014, Samsung Galaxy S5 wasn’t really considered attractive due to the fact that it lacked an attractive design. Samsung’s decision to incorporate that dotted pattern was clearly a mistake and the phone appeared more ugly than premium.

That being said, Samsung released another phone with perforated dots on the back and this device, the Galaxy Alpha featured a sophisticated design with a metal rim.  The Alpha features a back with a faux leather material and the holes appear more crowded.

The device is more durable and aesthetic as the phone is made of metal and not plastic painted in silver. There have been reports that Samsung phone paints start coming off after a while and devices look like they’ve survived an apocalypse.

Compared to the Alpha, the Galaxy S5 is taller at 142mm, coming with a thickness of 8.1mm. The Galaxy Alpha is 132.4mm tall and is thinner at 6.7mm. The home button in both these devices have a fingerprint sensor but the Galaxy S5 is further dust and water-resistant.

The displays in both these devices are Super AMOLED but their sizes differ in comparison. The S5 has the bigger, 5.1inches, Super AMOLED Full-HD display with 1080×1920 pixels along with a pixel density of 432ppi. The device is further protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3.

The Galaxy Alpha has a 4.7inches display, with a 720p display resolution and 312ppi pixel density. However, it has a better protection solution with Corning Gorilla Glass 4. The Galaxy S5 has a 32bit Qualcomm MSM8974AC Snapdragon 801 chipset under the hood, which supports a 2.5GHz Krait 400 processor quad-core processor. It has 2GB of RAM.

Compared to that, the Galaxy Alpha has Samsung’s own Exynos 5 Octa 5430 octa core processor which is quite powerful and doesn’t offer a single hiccup. It also has 2GB of RAM. Both these devices can be upgraded to 128GB and they both come with 32GB internal storage variants with the S5 having a 16GB variant as well.

Compared to the 12 MP rear-camera in the Alpha, the Galaxy S5 has a 16megapixel camera with features like phase detection autofocus, 1/2.6” sensor size, 1.12 µm pixel size, simultaneous HD video and image recording.

The front cameras in both these devices have a resolution between 2-2.1 megapixels. In terms of battery life, the Samsung Galaxy S5 is clearly superior with its 2800mAh unit, compared to the 1860mAh unit in the Galaxy Alpha. Both of these devices have the Ultra Power Saver mode, which further increases the battery life.

Last July, the Samsung Galaxy S5 was found in some benchmarks and after a year later, it has yet again popped up in some benchmarking scores. This was released a week after getting the Wi-Fi certification. The G903F is different from the device which bagged the Neo label last year.

The new device promises an octa-core Exynos chipset with 2GB of RAM and freshly updated to Android Lollipop 5.1. In Geekbench score, this device beats the Samsung Galaxy S5 with the Exynos 5422 processor but it’s no match for the present generation devices like Samsung Galaxy S6.

In other news, people who purchased the Samsung Galaxy S5 in Kalahari, before it merged with Takealot might witness their device going dead without prior warning, in the near future. A report in the Sunday Time suggests that the Galaxy S5 owners who purchased their device from the online retailer might have their phones blacklisted. Izak Boshoff, a Galaxy S5 owner’s phone went dead recently.