TECNO CAMON I: A BALANCED BUDGET SMARTPHONE

Tecno, owned by Transsion Holdings, brings budget smartphone targeting camera enthusiasts. The new camera-centric TecnoCamoni phone is priced at Rs. 8,999, and we got a chance to test the mobile. We used it quite a long and here is our experience with the phone. TecnoCamoni Review: Build and design The phone has an 18:9 display, meaning it is slightly taller and narrower than usual. The outer shell is made of durable plastic with rounded sides and edges. It offers good grip to hold, even in one hand. The front has the plane design which houses speaker grill on the top along with selfie camera and flash. At the back, it has a primary camera with quad-LED flash along with fingerprint scanner.

TecnoCamoni has a 5.65-inch IPS display with HD+ resolution. It is powered by TecnoTek MT6737 quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz, combined with 3GB RAM and 32GB of storage that can be expanded using microSD card up to 128GB.

The Dual-SIM smartphone supports 4G with VoLTE and has Bluetooth, WiFi b/g/n, and GPS as well.

Intuitive UI

The phone runs on Android Nougat with Tecno’s custom UI called HiOS on top. the intuitive UI is quite simple to understand and supports gestures, enabling users to various task easily and quickly.

Another interesting feature is – WhatsApp Mode toggle which allows you to use only WhatsApp notifications through while disabling background data for all other apps. In this mode, rest of the mobile apps will go to offline mode and will be active when you open them.

There is a service app that helps you to clean up RAM and blacklist calls and messages from a specific number. Also, there is a Power Management app, the TouchPal keyboard, and the Phoenix Browser preinstalled in the phone.

Performance

In this price segment, TecnoCamoni is packed with balanced hardware that enables you to enjoy the phone without any major issue. We tested the phone for more than three weeks and loaded it with various apps and games including the heavy one such as asphalt 8, Fifa, etc. While running the day-to-day apps, the phone was able to handle all of them well without any visible performance lag. Even when we run multiple apps simultaneously, it managed them. But with heavy graphics intensive apps, we notice a slight lag in the performance.

The HD+ screen produces good colors and offers immersive viewing experience. The display has decent brightness levels, but in bright sunlight, visibility isn’t great.

Camera

The smartphone has 13 MP camera at the back with quadLED flash. As it is a camera-centric phone, we were expecting great camera app, but basic functionality disappointed us. Yet, it managed to click decent quality images in daylight with good color reproduction. Using the manual mode, we managed to get better outdoor shots. Having the quad-LED, the phone can produce bright light while taking snaps in the dark, but it takes longer to focus.

The front 13 MP shooter enables you to capture a wide selfie. Also, it has LED flash that lets you capture selfies in dark. Shots captured with the front shooter is decent enough considering the price of the device.

Battery

Camoni is backed by a 3050 mAh battery that can last for more than 1 day with moderate usage. In our video loop test, it managed to play video for 9 hours and 15 minutes over wifi.

Bottomline: In the budget category, the TecnoCamoni has the balanced performance with decent battery life and camera.