Information technology: Galaxy Alpha will be slimmer than the iPhone 5s and with metal side rim, new pictures reveal

And the leaks about Samsung's premium Galaxy Alpha keep on leaking today. We just had a retailer posting it up for preorder online at a pretty unpalatable price, confirming most of the specs tipped so far, and now the phone gets sized up with none other than Apple's venerable iPhone 5s darling.

Well, the rumor that Galaxy Alpha will be about 6mm thin seems to hold water, judging from the side-by-side comparison with Apple's finest, which is 7.6mm thick. Coincidentally, the iPhone 6 is rumored to come with a sub-7mm girth, so Samsung has covered its direct competitor on that front as well. The rim seem to be made entirely of metal, as suggested by the two antenna end notches at the bottom, looking similar to... well, you know who, but the sides seem to be convexed for better grip.

The Galaxy Alpha screen is said to be with a 4.7" diagonal - again, just like on the rumored next-gen iPhone, but of Samsung's signature Super AMOLED variety, with the decent 320ppi pixel density. An octa-core Exynos processor 5433 processor that recently scored more than Snapdragon 805 is expected to be in power, alongside 2 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of non-expandable storage. A 12 MP rear camera with 0.3s "super-fast autofocus" was also cited for the Galaxy Alpha, meaning it will likely score Samsung's Phase Detection Auto Focus tech, just like its larger brother, the Galaxy S5. Android 4.4.4 KitKat, a fingerprint and a heart rate sensors are also suggested to be in store. This fast Exynos processor hasn't been announced just yet, but is widely expected to support LTE cat. 6 download speeds of up to 300 Mbits.

Perhaps in order to achieve the sub-7mm thickness, Samsung is claimed to use a removable 1850mAh battery for the Galaxy Alpha, which would explain the rumored "only" 720p screen resolution - it might have been chosen to keep the battery ticking longer. The juicer is allegedly replaceable, so the thin metallic design is by no means a unibody solution, despite the non-expandable storage speculation. The pictures below are marked with LTE-A on the back, which indicates that this is the Korean version of the phone, meant to run on the 300 Mbits networks over there. This marks either a Snapdragon 805 silicon, or the claimed Exynos 5433 chipset will indeed find place in the Galaxy Alpha. What do you think, would the Galaxy Alpha be a worthy competitor to an eventual 4.7" iPhone 6 when it lands?