Samsung Galaxy A40 review
The Galaxy A40 comes in an all-plastic body with and in Black, White,
Coral and Blue colors with the latter being the one in our hands.
Samsung says it has a 3D Glasstic back but in our experience, that's
just a fancy way of saying it's a plastic surface, which has been
finished to imitate glass. Sure, it really feels like glass at first but
you will start to recognize it for what it is over time.
The blue variant that we have looks more like gray at a certain
distance and when you look at it from an angle, you start to see a
subtle gradient, which changes colors much like the ones you'd see from a
spilled oil on wet asphalt. Also, fingerprint smudges stick quite
easily but aren't as prominent.
The Galaxy A40 lies well in the hand thanks to the slightly rounded
sides of the back panel. The curves help a lot with the grip and overall
aesthetics. And except for the slightly protruding camera module and
fingerprint scanner, the back design is pretty clean.The fingerprint reader works very well - it's blazing fast and accurate with the only thing slowing it down is the screen unlock. Just a brief tap on the scanner is needed for your finger to be recognized but it takes some time for the phone to unlock. Our only complaint concerns the positioning of the sensor - if it was just a few millimeters lower, it would have been perfect. Users with a tad bigger hands won't mind, though.
On the front, we see a slightly curved to the edges glass panel
improving the feel and grip even further. We also noticed that the
bezels are impressively thin, including the top and bottom ones. Samsung
managed to squeeze in a 5.9-inch panel inside a pretty small package.
For reference, the A40 is just 2mm taller than the high-end Galaxy S10e
and it's just as wide while offering a 0.1-inch bigger display.And the notch isn't all that obtrusive, although a bit deep. Perhaps the 25MP sensor on the front required a bit more space.
The side frame of the handset is still made of plastic but the color
and the overall feel make it look like it's made of metal. The volume
rocker and the power button are on the right, with the latter positioned
lower than the other and it's easy to reach. On the other side, we find
the SIM card and microSD card tray.
Given the size and the materials used for the Galaxy A40, it's not
surprising to see that it weighs just 140 grams. And as we said earlier,
it's super easy to handle with one hand and it somehow doesn't feel as
slippery as a normal glass sandwich phone would. The upside in all of
this is that the plastic is less prone to breaking but scratches are
easier to appear when placed on rough surfaces, so keep that in mind.Here's a 360-degree image of the Galaxy A40 to get a better understanding of its overall design.
Infinity-U Super AMOLED display on a budget
As we already mentioned, the screen is one of Galaxy A40's key selling points - SuperAMOLED panel, which is a rare Pokemon in around these parts of the market. It's also one of the few compact devices to have one, too.The screen measures just 5.9" in diagonal and packs a sufficient amount of pixels - 1080 x 2340 pixels resolution. The aspect ratio is extra tall - 19.5:9 and the pixel density is around 437 ppi. The rather small U-shaped notch on the top is indeed a bit deep but it's not wide, which is more important. You can get used to it really fast and it's not as obtrusive.
The results from our tests say that the Galaxy A40's panel isn't too
shabby in terms of picture quality too. It scored 410 nits with the
brightness slider cranked up to maximum and boosted up to 548 cd/m2 in
Max Auto mode. Sunlight legibility is excellent and rarely matched at
this price range.| Display test | 100% brightness | ||
| Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | ||
| 0.358 | 479 | 1338 | |
| 0 | 410 | ∞ | |
| 0 | 548 | ∞ | |
| 0 | 424 | ∞ | |
| 0 | 551 | ∞ | |
| 0.377 | 490 | 1300 | |
| 0.465 | 600 | 1290 | |
| 0.344 | 441 | 1282 | |
| 0.315 | 493 | 1565 | |
Battery life
Battery life is definitely not one of the strongest suits of the Galaxy A40 but it's not necessarily a weak point either. The 3,100mAh unit didn't deliver the runtimes we expected, especially in the web browsing and video playback tests. Still, an overall 73h endurance rating is fairly dependable so you will probably squeeze out a full day of moderate usage.
Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSer App.
The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge
will last you if you use the Samsung Galaxy A40 for an hour each of
telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established
this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across
devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.
Loudspeaker
The phone has a single bottom-firing speaker, which is a standard for phones in this price range. However, we can't call it loud as our tests show that it's considerably quieter than the competition. It might have something to do with the size of the handset but we can't be entirely sure.| Speakerphone test | Voice, dB | Ringing | Overall score | |
| 66.2 | 68.3 | 73.6 | Good | |
| 68.9 | 71.3 | 82.7 | Very Good | |
| 70.2 | 71.9 | 84.6 | Very Good | |
| 70.0 | 73.8 | 87.0 | Excellent | |
| 69.8 | 71.5 | 90.5 | Excellent | |
| 75.6 | 76.0 | 81.1 | Excellent |
Audio quality
The Samsung Galaxy A40 did splendidly in the first part of our audio quality test. When hooked to an active external amplifier, it delivered a perfectly accurate output and with high volume levels and perfect clarity marks.Hеadphones degraded the volume to just above average and introduced some intermodulation distortion. It also caused a moderate hike in stereo crosstalk and when you add it all up we can only give an average mark.
| Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
| +0.03, -0.05 | -91.0 | 90.7 | 0.048 | 0.048 | -85.9 | |
| +0.30, -0.17 | -89.0 | 90.8 | 0.065 | 0.265 | -61.1 | |
| +0.03, -0.06 | -93.4 | 93.2 | 0.0009 | 0.0082 | -92.3 | |
| +0.30, -0.12 | -92.0 | 91.9 | 0.102 | 0.231 | -47.0 | |
| +0.04, -0.04 | -92.2 | 91.9 | 0.0032 | 0.015 | -97.1 | |
| +0.05, -0.03 | -96.1 | 91.6 | 0.0033 | 0.024 | -56.4 | |
| +0.04, -0.00 | -93.3 | 93.2 | 0.0029 | 0.0077 | -93.8 | |
| +0.07, -0.01 | -92.9 | 93.2 | 0.015 | 0.076 | -68.8 | |
| +0.04, -0.04 | -90.7 | 90.7 | 0.0015 | 0.014 | -94.5 | |
| +0.05, -0.29 | -92.5 | 92.5 | 0.024 | 0.296 | -55.0 | |
| +0.01, -0.04 | -92.3 | 92.4 | 0.0041 | 0.0085 | -80.7 | |
| +0.45, -0.54 | -92.2 | 92.8 | 0.0084 | 0.492 | -51.5 |
Samsung Galaxy A40 frequency response
No comments:
Post a Comment