TECNO Phantom A review. Is it 5-star player?

We’ve had a unit of the TECNO Phantom A smartphone released earlier last month for a few weeks now and here are our first impressions about the company’s flagship device. As soon as it was released,  it received rave reviews and was being compared to the Samsung Galaxy S3 its critically acclaimed as the best budget Smartphone in the market. 

 A lot of people have been on my neck to publish this review. I appreciate your apprehension, but if my review must be true, I had to spend time with this device. I've decided to do this review now as the buzz around the phone has reduced and a review can be done in a cooler atmosphere and without sentiments.

If you are not into detailed techie things and just want a summary from me, the Phantom A is a superb piece of work from TECNO. Running on Android OS 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean)The dual-SIM smartphone comes with a 5-inch capacitive touch screen. 

The smartphone’s screen and keyboard makes for easy viewing and typing, browsing sites and watching videos. It has a decent 8MP camera at the back that takes great shots, although when you move the camera about it gets blurry until you keep the smartphone still before you can take a good shot. Still, its 1.2MP front-facing camera isn’t that impressive and didn’t do too well when we tried Skype calls.

HARDWARE

Tecno did a good job with the design and they managed to keep it at a thickness of 9.1mm the body is made of polycarbonate plastic that feels nice to the touch almost like hyperglaze. The Phantom looks good and feels sturdy. The 5-inch display means that you have enjoyable web browsing, video watching and the like. The Phantom has an acceptable weight. On the top of the phone is the 3.5mm headphone jack and the USB port. At the back of the phone is the primary 8.0mp rear camera which is embossed like the one on the HTC ONE X the flash is beside the camera and the speaker near the bottom edge of the phone.On the front, the phone spots a 1.2mp camera, the 720 X 1280 display and the regular android capacitive touch buttons which have been cleverly placed  close to the bottom edge of the phone.

CAMERA

The Tecno Phantom A1 comes equipped with an 8.0mp primary camera with Autofocus, LED flash and a 1.2 VGA camera in the front.  It works well and produces decent quality images. The Camera takes good pictures but it doesn't function well in low light situations the Auto focus is too slow and sometimes laggy 

PERFORMANCE

Phantom performs as you would expect any Android smartphone in its class to. It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.0Ghz dual-core Processor and has 1GB of RAM. There is a graphics GPU to handle graphics intensive apps like games, and the entire combination works fine. It has a mere 4GB of Internal Storage which is one of the major flaws with this phone in my opinion. However, Tecno compensated for this by providing a MicroSD expansion Slot expandable up to 32GB and they also provided an 8GB MicroSD Card with it. As i mentioned earlier, it runs on Android OS 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean)

MULTIMEDIA

There is a video player bundled and my AVI files were played back without issues. Audio playback is nice too, and loud, so music playback is enjoyable on the Phantom. There is a built-in equaliser (named Sound Effects), so you can tweak output a bit. FM Radio is in there as well.

TELEPHONY AND CONNECTIVITY

Honestly, we expected it to have atleast a 4G radio embedded in it but alas it comes with a 3.5G radio, hence you only get 3G, EDGE and GPRS connectivity which is manageable. It also has wifi and wifi hotspot functionality.

BATTERY

Tecno is offering  a power bank  to supplement the 2100mAh battery that comes with it. The battery already delivers up to 120 hours of talk time and about 400 hours of standby time. All this with two active sims.

MY CONCLUSION

The TECNO Phantom A is a steal. In its class, this is as close to perfection as things get especially considering its mid-range budget. TECNO has made a big splash with this one.