Samsung Galaxy A60/M40 review

Samsung's own One UI rocking Android Pie

As usual, the phone comes with Samsung's very own One UI based on the Android 9.0 Pie. It's a more simplified version of Samsung Experience and also focuses on one-handed use. In an era of smartphones with tall screens, this is godsent. The interactable UI elements and information is within thumb's reach with simple swipe down, including the quick toggles in the notification shade.

One UI also comes with its own take on the gesture-based navigation. Swipe from the left side of the bottom bezel is the recent apps menu, swipe from the right side of the bezel is back and swipe from the center takes you back to the home screen. Pretty simple. You can also swap the recent and back gestures' position or stick with the software buttons altogether.

General settings menu and navigation gestures

The rest of the features are well familiar from previous versions of Samsung's UI - you can place a button for the app drawer on the home screen, you can set to open the app drawer with a swipe down gesture and re-arange the apps on your home screens instead of using the app drawer. The so-called Night mode is a new to this version - it turns all the system menus, including the notification shade in black. The black theme is especially beneficial to phones with OLED panels but since this phone comes with a standard LCD, you are stripped off of the battery saving potential.

Home screen, app drawer, and notification shade

We've noticed that you can execute a swipe gesture from the front-facing camera when you are on the lock screen. It will instantly launch the camera app with the selfie mode turned on.

Speaking of the lock screen, you can bypass it with either a fingerprint or face unlock using the selfie camera. We had our fair share of false readings but it's mostly because we didn't train the fingerprint scanner the right way from the get-go.

Biometric security and options

Samsung has used a rather cheap implementation of the fingerprint scanner technology as it usually does on its low-end devices. You have to swipe your finger on the surface to set it up instead of tapping. Quick tip: try to swipe the side edge of your fingertip because this is usually the part of your finger that comes in contact with the scanning area. This way you will get fewer misreadings. Still, most of the times it's measurably slower than what we are used to using on mid-range phones. Either the reader itself or the software is a bottleneck here because it takes some time to light up the screen once it reds your fingertip.

The face unlock feature, on the other hand, isn't as convenient. We found it to somewhat slow. It could also be the lift-to-wake feature acting up because whenever we reached for the phone to lift it up, it takes a good two to three seconds for the camera to recognize the face. Also, there's no clear indication that the camera is trying to read your face, it just lights up the unlocked screen when it's done. We found it to be considerably faster if you reach for the power button yourself.

Scrolling a bit further down the general Settings menu, you will stumble upon the Advanced features sub-menu. It holds all the options for setting up Bixby, if you are using that, and offers a couple of other more useful options like Smart pop-up view, which can work only with apps supporting multi-window. You can also reduce the amount of animations to speed up navigation through menus.

Advanced features and gesture conrols

The Galaxy A60 retains some nifty gestures too like the Smart stay, which keeps the screen on while you are looking at it by using the front-facing camera or the finger sensor gestures. The latter allows you to open and close the notification panel by swiping up and down on the scanner. The lift to wake function is nice too but it reacts slow, as we already stated, and it doesn't light up the screen immediately. A software update should probably fix that.

The usual battery settings are tucked away in the General management menu as opposed to the Device care menu that we usually find in other Samsung phones. Anyway, the battery menu provides the usual stats such as apps and hardware that used the most juice since the last full charge. Three power settings are available - Optimized, Medium power saving and Maximum power saving. As you'd imagine, the last two limit the performance of the device to extend its battery life. The adaptive power saving toggle on the bottom means that you can let the system decide depending on your usage if you don't want to worry about which power mode should you run.

Battery menu and features

More advanced options can be found in the three-dot menu positioned in the upper-right corner of the battery section. It gives you more control over notifications and background apps as well as blacklist certain apps and prevent them from ever running. There's also a toggle for switching off the fast charging although, 15W isn't exactly fast so we can't think of a reason you wouldn't want your phone to be charged at 15W.

The One UI on this phone ran relatively smoothly. We didn't encounter any major bugs or crashes - just some occasional slowdowns that can easily go unnoticed by the untrained eye. Software updates will surely optimize the experience further as the Snapdragon 675 chipset is a competent mid-range solution.

Synthetic benchmarks and performance

The Galaxy A60 isn't the first smartphone we've encountered with the Snapdragon 675 on board so we already know what to expect. The SoC itself is based on the cost-efficient 11nm LPP node developed by Samsung itself so no wonder we've seen this chip on three phones from the company. It's a mixture of the 10nm and 14nm manufacturing processes and promises better energy efficiency than 14nm Exynos chips.

CPU-wise, the SoC is equipped with an octa-core chip with 2x Kryo 460 Gold cores clocked at 2.0GHz and 6x Kryo 480 Silver cores running at 1.7GHz. The GPU is Adreno 612. The SoC is paired with 6GB of RAM no matter the storage configuration, which is either 64 or 128GB.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  6863
• Samsung Galaxy A70
  6584
• Samsung Galaxy A60
  6582
• Realme 5 Pro
  6106
• Realme X
  5915
• Xiaomi Mi A3
  5686
• Samsung Galaxy A50
  5396
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  4927

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  2537
• Samsung Galaxy A70
  2391
• Samsung Galaxy A60
  2388
• Realme 5 Pro
  1913
• Samsung Galaxy A50
  1715
• Xiaomi Mi A3
  1531
• Realme X
  1475
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  1334

As expected, the chip is doing exceptionally well in the single-core and multi-core benchmark tests and it stands well ahead of the pack of midrangers. The Cotex-A76 derivatives definitely have something to say about it.

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  211915
• Realme 5 Pro
  182765
• Samsung Galaxy A60
  170102
• Samsung Galaxy A70
  167750
• Samsung Galaxy A50
  144574
• Xiaomi Mi A3
  140633
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  117829

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  27
• Realme 5 Pro
  27
• Samsung Galaxy A60
  15
• Samsung Galaxy A70
  15
• Samsung Galaxy A50
  14
• Xiaomi Mi A3
  13
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  10

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi A3
  27
• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  24
• Realme 5 Pro
  22
• Samsung Galaxy A60
  13
• Samsung Galaxy A70
  13
• Samsung Galaxy A50
  13
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  9.7

GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  16
• Realme 5 Pro
  15
• Samsung Galaxy A50
  9.2
• Samsung Galaxy A60
  8.1
• Samsung Galaxy A70
  8
• Xiaomi Mi A3
  7.1
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  6.3

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  13
• Xiaomi Mi A3
  13
• Realme 5 Pro
  12
• Samsung Galaxy A50
  8
• Samsung Galaxy A60
  7.3
• Samsung Galaxy A70
  7
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  5.9

3DMark SSE 3.1 Unlimited

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi 9T
  2329
• Realme 5 Pro
  2253
• Samsung Galaxy A50
  1353
• Xiaomi Mi A3
  1131
• Samsung Galaxy A60
  1123
• Samsung Galaxy A70
  1112

The GPU performance is where the Snapdragon 675 falls short although the difference is not as easily felt in day-to-day usage. Compared to the Exynos 9610's Mali GPU, for example, the Snapdragon 675 offers 15% less graphics power.

All in all, the chip in the Galaxy A60 is ideal for multi-tasking and general use for years to come. It offers exceptional computing performance - in multi-threaded and single-threaded workloads. Other chipsets are better tuned for gaming performance but this doesn't mean you will have a bad gaming experience with this one.