It’s fun reviewing a piece of technology you use every single day without fail because you kinda always know the ins and outs of how it works. Because of that I decided my 1st review of any kind to be of the Samsung Galaxy A40.
Overview
This Phone is a 2019 Galaxy A series smartphone that came out in Europe and parts of Asia.
Hardware
The Galaxy A40 is powered by an Exynos 7 Octa 7885 SOC and has 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. This makes it feel very quick to use when not a lot of apps are open at once but even when a good amount are running the phone still works really well. As I’ll get onto later this chipset and RAM does also help with running games.
The phone also has a 5.9 inch super amoled display which looks beautiful when watching videos as it has lovely colours on it but the screen can get really dim in a lot of light which does make it difficult to use. This phone is also fairly comfortable to use 1 handed but getting the top left hand corner can be difficult.
The phone has a fingerprint scanner on the back which works very well and is also very useful for security purposes. Not as important is the cameras of which it has 3, 2 on the back and 1 on the front in a notch. The front camera does produce some nice images and the back cameras also produce some cool images though the ultra wide camera does look a bit grainy and unappealing at points though that is because it is a 5 megapixel camera and not the 16 of the main camera.
Very important to a phone is battery life and it is not amazing on this phone though as i do use this phone for videos and podcasts alongside some games it probably isn’t representative of how someone else would use it but if you are into using the phone like that well be careful. Handily this phone does charge with USB-C which is delightful to charge the phone with as it’s reversible and i can just put it in regardless of side and it just charges.
Some miscellaneous things the phone has are a headphone jack which is something i really love in a phone as I can plug in headphones easily and an SD card slot which can support up to 512GB of storage. For my usage i have a 64GB card in it. Unfortunately installing the card is a major pain as you have to use a sim ejector tool and that sucks to use.
Overall this phone has great hardware and minus the battery life is really solid for what i need it for.
Software
The phone is running Android 10 (though in 2021 this will be upgraded to Android 11 according to Samsung) and using OneUI 2. Both of these i really enjoy using as they’re very snappy to use and get the job done. The icons for oneUI are a little odd and definitely do look very modern take that as you will but i like them for that reason.
The phone comes preloaded with a lot of apps that are useful but not really at the same time for example it comes with Google Apps like Maps and the Google App alongside Google Assistant which are great and work well on the phone whilst the phone also comes with Facebook and Spotify which i find not as useful though Facebook is far worse. The phone also has a few Samsung apps available like game launcher and Samsung Pay which are nice additions even if they’re not used by me a lot.
As using the phone as a phone ironically isn’t something i pay attention too it works as you can call and text and use mobile data and wifi for internet communication as easily as you’d expect. Calls sound nice on the speaker and texting is really easy to do on the on screen keyboard (I’m using it to type my review lol).
Game Performance
Gaming on this phone is very much a midtier endeavor as the phone can run higher spec games like COD Mobile or PUBG but they don’t run amazingly well and some other games have bizarrely poor performance like SMT Dx2 which ran kinda poorly. This performance put me off trying anything else high spec. However for more lighter games like world box or plague inc. (outside the weird aspect ratio of the app when i played it before a recent patch) they run perfectly and importantly look beautiful on the screen.
Now I didn’t do any benchmarking for my phone because I’m not particularly too interested in doing that so my performance stuff is just based off my eyes as some games didn’t get frame counters either. In general though for stuff i like playing it’s flawless for me.
Conclusion
The Galaxy A40 is probably my favourite phone I’ve ever owned everything outside of the battery life is exactly what I’d want and I’ve had no glaring issues with it at all. Which is a sign of a good phone for me. In the last month I’ve also been using my old J3 2016 and while a lot of the experience is there the A40 is something i love using because it has more to it. (I primarily use my J3 when my A40 is charging). So overall I’d recommend this phone if you can find it cheap as i find it lovely to use
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