Before October rolled around we knew little about TECNO Mobile, a Chinese smartphone brand that recently launched in South Africa. With the month recently done and dusted, we have reviewed a pair of devices from the company, with the latest being the TECNO CAMON 17P.
The first device, the Spark 7 Pro, ticked a lot of boxes as an affordable and well specced device that sits on the cusp between entry-level and mid-range. While it proved willing and able, it did feel a little underpowered, particularly in terms of its processing performance.
As such, it needed a little more oomph and while we liked what TECNO had to offer, we thought it best to hold out until something a bit better came around.
So is that the CAMON 17P? We spent the past two weeks with the phone to find out if it packs a bit more punch.
A few flourishes
Let’s start as we always do – design. Here TECNO has chosen to embellish the CAMON 17P with a few little flourishes. These include some gold etched branding on the back of the phone denoting which model of TECNO you’re using. Added to this is a similar treatment for the rear camera housing, which we will get to eventually.
This mixed with the Spruce Green colour option of our review model, does give a slight jewellery-esque look to the phone.
This might not be to everyone’s taste, but the design choices do help differentiate the CAMON 17P from the hordes of over similarly specced Android phones that all look the same from the front.
Speaking of which, the front of the device is on par with most modern flagship phones we see these days.
This as a sizeable 6.8″ display is present and a centre-placed punch hole to house the 16MP selfie camera.
Added to this is a fingerprint sensor embedded into the power button on the right hand side of the phone, which is a change up from the rear mounted sensor found on most phones found in this price range.
As such, the CAMON 17P serves up everything one expects from an affordable mid-range phone.
A little bloated
Shifting to the in-hand performance, this device is running HIOS (v7.6).
Our second encounter with this operating system yielded a mixed experience, with the skinned version of Android 11 featuring a few of the ailments of devices of this ilk from a few years ago.
Namely quite a bit of bloatware and duplication of apps. As such, we spent a good 45 minutes cleaning up the phone and removing anything we deemed superfluous. That process did, however, reveal a handy phone manager tool that keeps things running optimally.
While the discovery was welcome, the fact that some apps we have never encountered before, such as Freezer, cannot be deleted, is more than a little frustrating.
Luckily though, the speed of the phone while launching apps, navigating settings and multitasking is far better than what we encountered on the Spark 7 Pro. On this front an octa-core MediaTek Helio G85 chipset is present, with a generous 6GB of RAM making all the difference and 128GB of onboard storage.
This experience also bore itself out during our benchmarking. To that end the CAMON 17P registered a single-core and multi-core score of 373 and 1 356 respectively on GeekBench. This is better than the aforementioned Spark 7 Pro, Oppo A72 and A53s, so this phone is in good company.
Looking at the camera performance, TECNO has opted for a quartet of lenses on the rear. The star of the show is the 64MP primary option, with a 2MP macro and 2MP depth sensing lens added to the mix.
Like the Spark 7 Pro, we found the camera on the truly solid, especially while capturing image while outdoors.
The only issue is a slight delay between pressing the capture button and actually capturing the picture. Luckily though, there was no noticeable distortion or blurring as a result of this, with the ISO of the phone yielding bright and richly detailed pictures.
Final verdict
At R4 999 (RRP), the CAMON 17P may be a little more expensive than some of the other recent devices that TECNO has brought into South Africa, but the extra expense yields a better equipped device from a performance perspective, which is the only real criticism we had for the Spark 7 Pro.
It is not necessarily going to challenge some of the powerful mid-range devices we have seen flood the market of late, but the CAMON 17P is expertly equipped for the job it needs to do. Added to this is a massive 5 000mAh battery that yields a solid two days of battery life.
If you are willing to take a chance on a lesser known brand, then the CAMON 17P is more than willing to deliver a solid all-around smartphone experience.
FULL DISCLOSURE: THE TECNO CAMON 17P WAS SEEDED TO HYPERTEXT TO KEEP AFTER THE REVIEW.
