It’s safe to say that many phones these days have a lot of features by default already, but none of them packs this many features for a sub-RM500 phone. Let’s give a warm welcome to the LEAGOO Alfa 2, a smartphone that went out of its way to add more features in it.
Packaging
The LEAGOO Alfa 2 has a pretty standard packaging with no frills – open the very tight lid and you’ll find everything that’s found in the unboxing video below.
In case you didn’t get a clear picture of what’s inside, here’s a quick recap.
Design and ports
The LEAGOO Alfa 2 has a pretty simple body – the whole body is made out of plastic with a coat of matte paint, yet features some additional design choices like a 2.5D glass to encase the display.
Pretty good looking, to be honest. Even the finishes and the camera protrusion is nicely furnished, although I don’t like any sort of protrusion at all.
In any case, the back does feature the Alfa 2’s much-touted back touch function, and it’s nicely outlined at the back of the case. I do wish that it’s a sticker instead of the entire outline engraved on the back of the phone itself.
Then comes the ports – it’s a standard affair with the micro USB port at the bottom, audio jack at the top, and both power and volume rocker situated at the right side of the phone.
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What’s different with the Alfa 2 however is the navigation buttons. Again it’s the standard positioning here, as it’s found at the bottom, but the home button that in the middle is now substituted with a subtle LED ring, which also doubles as the notification LED. This design reminds me of the Nexus One era of smartphones, which I really like.
Opening the back cover reveals the dual-SIM slots and a single microSD card slot. There’s also a large metal plate covering the entire battery, and yes – the battery is not removable. Everything right here is pretty standard, but there are extra pins between the SIM card – and that’s for the rear-touch panel.
Screen
The LEAGOO Alfa 2 features a 5-inch 720p display, which in this era, it’s only found in low-priced devices. LEAGOO isn’t trying to hide from this fact or do anything fancy to avoid this realization, but instead embraces this hardware choice.
I would say that the inclusion of this 2.5D glass that curves at the sides is definitely a very great addition for the Alfa 2. That said, LEAGOO is not joking with their super clear display – as the LEAGOO Alfa 2 actually features a stunningly bright and sharply coloured IPS display.
Thumbs up, even for a 780p display.
Rear touch function
I wouldn’t say this is an original idea – implementing a touchpad at the back of the phone. Oppo has done it too. That said, let’s not forget that the Alfa 2 by no means a high-end smartphone – it’s a budget smartphone aimed at the sub-RM500 price range. It’s amazing, because the touch panel here works just fine, and registers on every single menu or app that I’ve tried.
Although it’s not an engineering marvel to have rear touch panels, but having this function integrated on such a low-priced smartphone is amazing. The touch panel found on the Alfa 2 is indeed very tiny and navigating through apps was a little frustrating to scroll up and down.
For example, scrolling through Facebook. It’s great that I don’t have to see my finger while scrolling through, but I can’t get 50% of the screen scrolled per swipe. I really do wish it was larger – then it will be the perfect gimmick.
Camera
The 13MP rear-camera is certainly a great performer for its price. Let’s begin with a simple picture of the aloe plants around my hometown.
On a sunny day, the pictures are actually pretty good when minimized, but on full crop, the details are washed and definitely suffered from loss of details throughout the picture. The wall that is actually very rough after a decade of wear and tear from the harsh weather looked rather smooth in the picture. Colour reproduction on the other hand is rather well-done.
The fine details of this particular tree however wasn’t captured with as much details as I’d like, but then again that’s on full crop. The colour reproduction again is spot-on, albeit that the exposure was pretty much my fault for cranking it down.
The camera on the Alfa 2 isn’t anything to wow about, but definitely isn’t the usual sub-par quality found in other sub-RM700 smartphones. The Alfa 2’s images does lose out its details in all lighting condition, but it did reproduce the image with decent colours. The Alfa 2’s camera isn’t the speediest, but it’s not really that slow either – taking about a second or two to snap the picture.
I’d say the Alfa 2’s camera is perfect for social media and instant messages. Maybe even for some smartphone wallpaper. Front-facing has the same story as well – it gets the job done, but quality isn’t the crispest in the market. Overall, it gets the job done pretty nicely.
Performance
The Alfa 2 went through the usual test suite – but Epic Citadel doesn’t allow me to run on anything higher than High Quality, and so I just ran it at whatever the highest is offered here.
To my surprise, the LEAGOO Alfa 2 scored at about 41FPS on 720p resolution on average throughout the number of retests on Epic Citadel, which is to say it isn’t the best in 3D games. Presumably, it can’t run beyond 30FPS on Ultra High Quality.
Then comes the Vellamo tests. First up, the Chrome browser test. It did perform quite well, at about the performance of the aged Nexus 4. Throughout my use case of the Alfa 2, it can handle my browsing style quite well actually, with a few tabs open at once and browsing Facebook at the same time. It didn’t dump any of the things I’m working on to the RAM, which I’m really glad.
I did the other two tests – the Metal and Multicore benchmarks, but I don’t think it’s relevant since the Alfa 2 isn’t meant to be a powerhouse in the first place. However, the smartphone itself is rather chilly even after intense back-to-back benchmarks, with the highest temperature on the sensor itself floating at about 56ºC.
Pretty cool.
Battery
The LEAGOO Alfa 2 features is a measly 2,600mAh – which is totally insufficient for my use case of course, and the battery can seriously just die after half a day of use. There is nothing much to say about the battery though, other than the fact that it’s not even removable – so you can’t upgrade it, even if you have the option to do so.
In LEAGOO’s defense though, LEAGOO is definitely targeting the group of average consumers and not power users like me, so I would understand that their choice of 2,600mAh is a reasonable one. But still – at least 3,000mAh please?
The included charger is not too shabby, as it has 5V with 1.5A output, making it not the slowest charger. To my surprise, it looks eerily similar to the LG Nexus 4 charger. Hmmmm…
Wrap up
Here’s the real deal with the LEAGOO Alfa 2 – it’s stunningly beautiful with lots of features. The screen is bright and sharp, camera is decent, performance is okay, and the included accessories is way more than enough. To be honest, this is definitely THE smartphone to get under RM500. Even available in 4 colours! If you can fork out more cash, have a look at the Alcatel Flash 2 instead.
Check it out here, and click here to buy one now!
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