TECNO is a smartphone brand that has slowly but surely been growing its presence in South Africa. It operates for the most part in the entry-level to mid-range space, with many of the devices it has launched locally also having landed on our review desk.

One of the latest to do so was the Spark 10 Pro, which is the top specced offering in the Spark 10 series. We noted in our review of that device that while it was impressive in most aspects, its lack of 5G support and the fact that TECNO had a 5G model destined for our shores, had us sitting on the fence when it came time to recommend.

Now said device has arrived in South Africa, and over the past couple of weeks we have had the TECNO Spark 10 5G in for review. Here we aim to see whether the addition of 5G support is a game changer compared to the 10 Pro, as well as how the device stacks up to other offerings in the market at a similar price point.

The middle child

As mentioned the Spark 10 5G is not the best specced option within the series, despite being the latest to land locally and the only model to support 5G. In fact, it sits in the middle of the pack, and only beats its brethren in one key category – the processor – a MediaTek Dimensity 6020 chipset.

In most other areas the 10 Pro sits top of the trio of Spark 10 devices sold in South Africa.

That said, by mid-range phone standards, the Spark 10 5G is nothing to turn your nose up at, with a large and vibrant 6.6″ display, a massive 5 000mAh battery which is good for at least two days in our testing, and the same 50MP primary camera setup as the Pro, which we found to a solid all-around option, but we’ll get to all those elements shortly.

As for the design, the Spark 10 5G is not doing anything out of the norm for devices in price band (R5 499). There is one flourish though, with the rear cover featuring a unique layered block design which TECNO dubs META (not to be confused with the Facebook variant).

Our review model comes in the rather handsome META Black colourway which looks more like a gunmetal navy in our view, along with a generic clear plastic cover to protect the phone and ensure you can see the aforementioned pattern.

Where it matters

Aesthetics out of the way now, let’s look at the elements that really count – performance.

Here the Spark 10 5G does quite nicely, both in terms of its actual in-hand performance, as well as in benchmarking. The former sees apps boot up quickly, and switching between them is equally rapid and showing no signs of sluggishness.

In our benchmarking, the phone mustered a single-core and multi-core score of 712 and 1 984 on GeekBench (6.0). For reference that is better than the Samsung Galaxy A33 5G that we benchmarked last year.

The Spark 10 series also features an odd addition in the form of extended or virtual RAM. This system essentially allows you to partition a small percentage of your memory and integrate into the processor-specific RAM. On the 10 5G up to 4GB of extended RAM can be added to the native 4GB of RAM on the device.

We tried this out and in our experience, the difference in performance was not that notable, even in processor intensive applications or functions. We event re-ran our benchmarks and only saw an increase of between 5 and 12 points for the GeekBench tests.

Whether this is a feature designed to give your phone a boost from time to time is unclear, but for right now, it does not seem to add any noticeable benefits to the immediate performance of this device.

Now for the camera, and here the 10 5G is on par with the 10 Pro, namely as they are sporting the same hardware in that department, with a 50MP primary lens doing most of the heavy lifting. TECNO has added some AI to assist in capturing images, quickly adjusting ISO, white balance, and other elements to give the Spark 10 5G a real point and shoot functionality.

If you are wanting richly detailed images, however, you will need to toggle on the 50MP mode, which not only captures more nuance, but also increases the file size for such images to anywhere from 8MB to 20MB depending on the subject matter. As such, it is a feature you should only be using provided you have a microSD card on hand for additional storage, as those hi-res images can start to take up a lot of space quickly.

In general use though, the camera performance of the Spark 10 5G is quite tidy.

Final verdict

At R5 499 the TECNO Spark 10 5G is well priced for this segment of the mobile market. The addition of 5G also gives it an advantage over devices from other brands, with Samsung and OPPO being the only ones who seem to support the broadband standard in this price range.

As for whether it is the savviest pick within the Spark 10 series? We’d have to say yes, as the support of 5G adds a level of futureproof-ness that the 10 Pro cannot deliver. The only area where the Spark 10 5G is best is on screen size, resolution, and RAM, but by all other metrics, it is more than capable of competing.

As such, if we’re going to suggest any new phones out of TECNO, it would be the company’s first 5G-capable one to land locally.

FINAL SCORE: 8.5 OUT OF 10.