Just bought myself the Samsung A40 for my daily use to replace my older A5 2017 model as its becoming sluggish and blurry camera shot. Like my A5, the A50 I bought it on online sellers and may have originated from other countries, it seems this kind of mid range spec phone with the size of 5.75inches height or smaller is not available in Philippine market. They were selling oversize phone that is hard to use with one hand or keep on falling if you put it in your pocket like I always do. They release A20, 30, 50, 60, 70, 80, but no A40.
Spec wise, the speed is almost the same, but with the A40 having more ram memory of 4GB instead of 3GB with the A5. Almost same size and dimension but the A40 is a little bit lighter because it uses plastic material on its side and back instead of aluminum side and glass back panel with the A5. The aluminum and glass material in the A5 is good to touch but i rarely appreciate it as I always use protective casing covering it up, I much appreciate the lighter weight of the A40. A40 Camera is expected to be better with higher pixel rate, it has dual lens regular and wide lens which is better than using software capability on a single lens. Its fingerprint reader is placed at the back and is responsive than those of the A5. A5 is waterproof though but that looses its capabilities as its gets older due to wear anyway. One thing that bugs me ever since I used Samsung S5 then A5 now A40 is that annoying major updates, yes it gives you more feature but it will slow down your phone, thus I switch to A40 from A5 in the first place. When I was using my A5 it was good, but after it recieved a major update, it became sluggish because of additional features they put on, like my sms messenger was snappy and simple, but after an update it has some search feature where you can search word by word on the entire inbox and has http link capababilities, this feature has slowed down my sms app even on opening it, and there is no settings to turn it off, also being updated, you would be unable to easily root it and remove some bloatware or custom rom like I did with my S5 very long ago. I decided not to make any major update on my A40 to maintain that smooth and fast operation at least till I replace it after a few years when the battery starts to wear even though its bugging me in the notification.
UPDATE Nov 12 2020: In the end I succumb to updating my phone into major android 10 update, aside from the update notification keeps bugging me that you can't remove, the always on charging percentage where you could see a battery bar percentage while charging got me to update finally, and after months of use, as expected regretted it. Battery drains faster, one reason maybe due to even you turn off secondary sim like I always do because I just use it for mobile internet when outside the house, I notice its not totally off and you still keep recieving sms messages. But one of the major annoyance is its camera, it was very good and snappy back then, now its slow and blur a lot, focus is abnormally inconsistent, it focus and blur and focus again, It's laggy when going to camera coming from a lock sleep state, the moment you really need to capture something is over before it snap to camera mode, really annoying, and pressing the shot button took time before it actually gets captured, everything is over before you get the picture, which do not suffer before the update. As expected I totally regretted updating and now starting to think and consider changing phone probably next year even though I just recently bought it before the pandemic and lockdown starts, but Im going for a Nokia this time due to this annoying force updates. The only thing that is stopping me from going away with a samsung phone is the AMOLED screen which I really liked. I really hate this major updates and keeps forcing you to do so by bugging you with notification now and then, why break a perfectly working phone, of course, when you want to try out something new and got bored of your phone and update it.
