Performance
Under the hood, the TCL 40R runs on Android 12 with TCL's own UI 4.0 layered over it. The device is powered by the Mediatek Dimensity 700 chipset, featuring an octa-core CPU that includes two high-performance Cortex-A76 cores running at 2.2 GHz and six Cortex-A55 cores at 2.0 GHz dedicated to efficiency. The inclusion of the Mali-G57 MC2 GPU means that while it handles general tasks smoothly, it is best suited for moderate gaming, with more graphic-intensive tasks taking a slight hit. The phone offers two storage variants, 64GB with 4GB RAM and 128GB with 4GB RAM, with expandable storage through a microSDXC card slot, albeit at the expense of a SIM slot.