While most competitors are still wandering on the 28nm process, Samsung's 20nm SoC has been quietly launched. The first product is Exynos 5430, which is installed on some versions of Galaxy Alpha and still uses the A15+A7 architecture we are familiar with. Today we are going to introduce the Korean version of Galaxy Alpha.

This article tests the SM-G850S using Exynos 5430, that is, SK telecom customized Galaxy Alpha. The domestic version uses Snapdragon 801.

Galaxy Alpha is still packaged in an environmentally friendly paper box, but the color has been changed to gray and decorated with dense patterns.

There are some technical features on the back. It can be seen that the Korean Galaxy Alpha supports LTE Cat. 6 technology, uses an eight core processor, 2G Ram, 720P Super AMOLED, 12 million pixel rear camera+2.1 million front camera, 1860mAh battery

Open the package and you can see the characteristics of Samsung's previous products that Galaxy Alpha has returned to. The protective film on the screen is marked with the key parameters of the product (Galaxy S5 is a transparent protective film).

The Galaxy Alpha has a 4.7 inch screen, which is particularly compact compared with the recent generation of Galaxy S series products.

The front panel of the Galaxy Alpha still has the characteristics of Samsung. Without the mellowness of the Galaxy S5, the body line is more masculine and closer to the Galaxy S2. The 4.7 inch 720P Super AMOLED screen, in addition, because of the Pentile array, has a large gap in screen fineness compared with mainstream high-end products.

The top is still a earphone net cover that is level with the front panel. Because it is a white version, the two sensors on the right side and the front camera are a bit abrupt... In Lao Luo's words, this design is too "casual". The white Galaxy Alpha front panel uses a dense cross pattern.

The lower flat entity Home key is equipped with fingerprint recognition function, and the left and right sides are equipped with touch keys, which are multitask and return. The physical keys have a hard feel and are not flexible enough.

The back is a relatively flat back cover with LTE-A X3 (LTE Cat. 6 network) and Samsung brand logo.

The rear 12 million pixel camera is equipped with ISOCELL technology and a native 16:9 sensor. On the left side is a led fill light and heart rate detection.

Compared with the white back cover of the Galaxy S5, the white of the Galaxy Alpha is more pure, the pattern is more detailed, and the feel is good.

One of the characteristics of Galaxy Alpha is that Samsung has added the design of a metal middle frame to Android phones for the first time. Now we can't spray "Ten Thousand Year Plastic" anymore. Samsung's metal middle frame design is relatively tough, with four corners thickened, and both sides of the fuselage sunken. Although it is the first time to use the metal middle frame design, the metal technology of Galaxy Alpha has been relatively mature, and the metal cutting and polishing are excellent.

The concave design is adopted on both sides of the fuselage. Even if there are keys on the side, we can also place the fuselage on the side. The right side of the fuselage is the power button.

On the left side of the fuselage is an integrated volume key.

On the top of the fuselage is a 3.5mm headphone connector and a noise reducing microphone. You can also see that the metal partition layer of the Galaxy Alpha and the metal part fit well.

The speaker is set at the bottom, and a micro USB interface is in the center.

Although the Galaxy Alpha is only 6.7mm thick, it still has Samsung's traditional removable back cover and battery design, but it does not support micro SD card expansion.

Due to the limitation of body size and thickness, the battery capacity is relatively small, only 1860mAh. The battery is equipped with NFC coil.

Galaxy Alpha is also Samsung's first mobile phone to use Nano SIM.

When we compare the Galaxy Alpha with the iPhone 6, which is also 4.7 inches in size, we can see that the Galaxy Alpha is still more compact in the body design, because Apple still insists on the "three-stage" design.

Both are ultra-thin body designs lower than 7mm, and the camera has bulges.

Compared with the metal frame, the Galaxy Alpha line is relatively strong, while the iPhone 6 is relatively smooth.

The second layer of the package is the accessories of the mobile phone.

The accessories of Korean Galaxy Alpha are still very "conscientious", with the configuration of dual charging and dual charging.

The Galaxy Alpha still uses Samsung's usual TouchWiz. Its overall function and design are almost identical to that of the Galaxy S5, with only two additional wallpapers.

The drop-down bar shortcut switch also adopts a circular design.

The function of the setting menu is also highly consistent with that of the Galaxy S5, but it lacks the function of "download thruster" (4G and WiFi network can be used simultaneously to accelerate download).

Galaxy Alpha uses a system based on Android 4.4.4, with a kernel version of 3.10.9.

The system does not support ART mode, but because only 720P is used, the overall smoothness of Galaxy Alpha is still at a high level.

The Korean Galaxy Alpha supports the LTE network of China Unicom, while the plug-in mobile card can only use GPRS.

The Korean Galaxy Alpha uses the Exynos 5430 processor, which is composed of four core Cortex-A15 and four core Cortex-A7. The frequency is 1.8GHz and 1.3GHz respectively. The core version of Cortex-A15 is r3p3. The GPU, like Exynos 5420 and Exynos 5422, is Mali-T628mp6. The biggest feature of Exynos 5430 is undoubtedly the introduction of 20nm process.

Galaxy Alpha has a total of 2G Ram, and the available memory is about 1G after startup.

32G built-in storage capacity, available at 25.8G.

We also conducted some performance tests here. In Anthare 5.1, the Korean Galaxy Alpha scored nearly 50000 points, which was very good. Due to the low resolution, the GPU score also exceeded 17000 points.

Pi 10 million bit operation tests the floating-point performance of the CPU. Galaxy Alpha used 26 seconds to complete the test, and its performance was good, similar to that of Snapdragon 801/805.

The GBA simulator tests the single core performance of the CPU. Due to the low frequency, the performance of Galaxy Alpha is not outstanding, and there is a big gap compared with the high frequency A15 with 200 frames

In the 1080P 60FPS ref15 video soft solution test, the performance of Galaxy Alpha is also disappointing, even worse than Exynos 5410. It is estimated that the eight core HMP is not well regulated.

RAR test. This test is aimed at CPU L2 cache. Eight core processors will have a great advantage in this test. Galaxy Alpha also gets a good score of more than 1700KB/s.

In the flash memory test of A1 SD Bench, the reading performance of Galaxy Alpha is 159.13MB/s, and the writing performance is 82.36MB/s. It can be basically determined that Galaxy Alpha uses eMMC5.0, but the reading performance is too low and the optimization is not good

GPU test GFXBench, Galaxy Alpha's performance is amazing, not only significantly surpassing Exynos 5420/5422, but also pulling Snapdragon 801 off the horse, but there is still a certain gap with A8/Snapdragon 805.

3DMark's performance is not as eye-catching as GFXBench's, but it is still significantly improved compared with Exynos 5420/5422.

When we ran the GPU test, we turned on the frequency detection. It was found that the maximum GPU frequency of Galaxy Alpha was 600MHz. Compared with Exynos 5420/5422, the performance improvement was not significant. It is estimated that the 20nm process and the new drive optimization contributed to the performance improvement.

Galaxy Alpha is equipped with Samsung's own 12 megapixel ISOCELL camera, a native 16:9 sensor, which has never appeared in previous products.

It supports video recording of up to 3840 * 2160, or 4K, and the frame number reaches 30FPS. It can be seen that the ISP performance of Galaxy Alpha is very strong.

In the actual photography experience, the 12 megapixel camera of Galaxy Alpha continues the high resolution feature of the Galaxy S5, and is even better than the Galaxy S5 in dim light imaging. In the case of insufficient light, the success rate of focusing is more colorful than the Galaxy S5 with Snapdragon series processors, similar to the Galaxy S5 with Exynos 5422. The following are some photo samples (click to view the large picture):

Low light photography (turn off image stabilization).

Low light photography (image stabilization on).

For more Galaxy Alpha tests, please continue to follow our detailed evaluation.