Samsung Galaxy A40 review

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.

Color accuracy is impressive too - dE2000 is just 1.9 in the default mode and goes up to 3.1 and 3.9 in cinema and photo modes. These results are typical for a higher-priced handset. Essentially, you won't be able to tell the difference between input and output colors.

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.

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.

Samsung Galaxy A40 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.