It is the fourth generation of the M series and offers better performance than its older predecessors. The Samsung Galaxy M40 is in the 250-300$ price range class. It was launched by Samsung Mobiles India this June and it the highest performance phone in Samsung’s M class.
It comes in two colors – Coral Blue and Midnight blue and has the camera embedded into the display. Is it a good bargain against the other Samsung smartphones from the other series, and against the other 250-300$ price range smartphones?
Design
The design of the phone considering its price is very attractive. It has the same glossy finish on the back as its predecessors but, it has a much more beautiful design. It has a very high-quality feel like any Samsung, and it is comfortable as well. The button might be a problem for someone who is more used to a front-facing button, and it harms the simple design on the back.
Display
The display is 6.3-inch PLS TFT capacitive touchscreen, with a resolution of 1080×2340 pixels. When you put this phone against its rivals, this display does a good job. However, even though it’s not AMOLED, taking into consideration the price it is no wonder. The front camera as we said above is embedded into the display and it looks beautiful as the display goes around it. It is also equipped with Corning Gorilla Glass protection on the front for better durability.
Performance
Performance-wise hard to find any improvements from M30 and M20, you can still see that they haven’t addressed some issues that previous phones had. Even though it has a better chipset, specifically the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 it still has some stutters here and there. This phone comes in two variations – 6GB RAM with 128GB ROM or 4GB RAM with 64GB ROM, and honestly, for using it on a regular day-to-day basis, it can do the job just fine. It comes with 3500mAh battery and 15W Type C fast charging.
When it comes down to gaming or other high-performance capabilities, it’s not really in the same league as the flagship phones and it is pretty obvious when you see the price tag. You may experience a lack of performance when you play more complicated games though. However, since Samsung is one of the main sponsors of American Sports leagues, you can expect them to improve the model to be able to stream high quality matches from the current MLB season or watch the NFL preseason games.
Software
It runs on the One UI that is based on Android Pie. Here you don’t get any disadvantages when buying the phone, because even the flagship Samsung models run on the same UI. It has a nice feel to it, and it is a lot fresher than the old Samsung UIs.
Camera
As for the camera, it has a three-camera setup at the back that has a 32MP, f/1.7 primary camera, an 8MP ultra-wide camera with a lens size of 12mm and a third 5MP depth sensor camera. All of these coming together bring such beautiful photos, that even compete with the +500$ price range phones. As in any Samsung phone, you will get the extra features like slow motion in 240p FPS, Hyperlapse, Face Unlock and much more.
However, all these mid-priced phones have trouble with low lighting, and it is the same story with the Galaxy M40. Furthermore, Samsung is known for enchasing colors on their phones, and on this phone, the color saturation is a bit much and when the lighting is low the camera fails to capture clear images. There is no night mode, so capturing photos without flash is next to impossible.
Verdict
Finally, for a phone in its price category, it takes on some of the more expensive models. It is a well built, well-designed phone that sometimes might lack in performance and have minor speed bumps here and there but nothing too major. The design is where this phone shines, it looks truly beautiful with the edge display and three camera setup behind looking similar to the latest iPhones.
The phone is equipped with large RAM memory capacity to make sure you never face bug problems when multitasking. Daytime photography will be as close as you are going to get to the flagship models in this price range and nighttime photography isn’t as good but it should give you some solid photos. The Samsung Galaxy M40 works well as a mid-performance smartphone, but if you want the extra edge, you will be better off buying a more powerful phone.