Drivesmart Alpha X Review 2021

What Is The Drivesmart Alpha X ?

The Drivesmart Alpha X is Drivesmart’s latest GPS Speed Camera Detector and is easily their most popular to date. The Alpha X includes live radar and laser detection which sits atop the comprehensive, and regularly updated GPS Database. It also improves upon the previous Alpha models sophisticated Radar False Alert Filtering, and now includes filtering of vehicles that use Collision Detection and Lane Guidance.

Why Do You Need The Drivesmart Alpha X ?

The Drivesmart Alpha X offers the most benefit to people that live in built up areas, or regularly drive in areas that tend to trigger more radar false alerts. These come from things like supermarket sliding doors, temporary traffic lights, high end vehicles using collision detection and lane guidance etc. With the Alpha X, these frustrations are advertised as a thing of the past and the alerts you receive should all be relevant.

Key Features Of The Drivesmart Alpha X

1. Sophisticated False Radar Alert Filtering for all Radar Speed Cameras and Lane Guidance or Collision Detection vehicles.
2. Comprehensive, regularly updated FREE speed camera database downloads. UK & Europe.
3. OLED Display
4. Night time driving Dark Mode
5. Motorway Driving Increased Alert Distance

Overall Performance

During our 3 Road Stress Tests the Drivesmart Alpha X performed strongly, as expected.

Bearing in mind, the Alpha X still uses much of the same technology as the Drivesmart Alpha. In fact, the only real differences we could find were the ability to filter vehicles using Collision Detection / Lane Guidance Sensors and the sharper OLED display. Both laser and radar cameras were easily tracked time after time with the GPS Database working competently in the background. The alerts are sharp and descriptive, the menu is easy to use and updating was fast and simple (providing you own a windows based PC).

The competence of the lane guidance and collision detection filtering proved difficult to measure, as we do not drive vehicles that have these features. However, we definitely did not receive any false alerts from any high end vehicles as they drove past. Draw your own conclusions from this. Personally, I believe it is a feature that has a lot of potential, but might not be something that is fully utilised for a couple of years. If you are a glass half full type of person, this would be seen as a feature that will future-proof the Alpha X.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, the Alpha X performed as we expected. Very well just like it’s predecessor. If you are a long time Drivesmart customer, or someone new, you will not be disappointed by this latest offering. It’s solid and dependable, just like the Drivesmart Alpha. Unfortunately, it is so very similar to the Alpha, it was difficult to get hugely over excited. The new tech upgrades will be very useful, but that payoff is still a little further down the road (pardon the pun).

The only other gripe is the unconventional RJ9 power socket. It’s not a major problem, as it gets the job done, but for such a forward looking system, the power supply needs to be USB Type C or Micro USB at the very least.

With all that said, the Drivesmart Alpha X is definitely a system we would recommend. Just bear in mind, it is not compatible with Apple MAC, so you will need access to a Windows based PC to update it. If this is a deal breaker, check out the MAC compatible Aguri Skyway GTX-80.