Tecno surprised us with a pop-out portrait lens on its Phantom X2 Pro flagship phone back in December. For its MWC event yesterday, the Chinese company announced the Tecno Phantom V Fold, which happens to be the first horizontally-folding phone to be powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000+ processor.
Here’s what they new foldable kid has to offer.
Design
Like many other Chinese foldables, the Tecno Phantom V Fold’s folding screen doesn’t show a deep crease like that of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4. The phone also folds completely flat, without the gap left by Samsung’s foldable.
The Phantom V Fold virtually crease-free foldable screen comes in at 7.85 inches with a 2,296 x 2,000 resolution, while the outer smaller screen comes in at 6.42-inches with a 2,550 x 1,080 resolution. Both AMOLED panels feature a refresh rate of up to 120Hz.
The screen looks great in most conditions, but something to note is the maximum brightness is noticeably dimmer than all other recent foldables.
As far as durability goes, the claim here is that the device is capable of 200,000 folds, which matches that of the Galaxy Z Fold 4.
Users will also have the option to choose from two color options, white and black.
Performance & battery
The Phantom V Fold is powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000+, making this the first large foldable to use silicon from a brand other than Qualcomm.
The Dimensity 9000+ is a 4nm chipset, but it clearly ranks below the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in terms of raw power. But, I don’t think most users would notice unless they are heavy gamers.
When it comes to battery performance, the Phantom V Fold packs a 5,000mAh battery with support for 45W fast charge. This should juice up the phone to a 100% charge in around 55 minutes.
That’s a tad bit slower than the Chinese competition, but it still beats the Galaxy Z Fold 4, assuming you don’t mind missing out on wireless charging.
Cameras
Inside that visually striking circular camera module is a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel telephoto camera (2x optical zoom) and a 13-megapixel ultra-wide camera.
For your selfie needs, you get two punch-hole selfie cameras, a 16-megapixel one on the foldable screen, and a 32-megapixel version on the outer screen.
We cannot make any conclusive opinions on how the cameras perform since we do have the device, but from the initial reviews online, the performance is comparable to that of their Phantom X2 Pro.
Software
On the software side, the Phantom V Fold runs on Tecno’s HiOS 13 Fold based on Android 13. The company claimed that it’s customized the folding experience on its device for the top 1,000 most downloaded apps globally, and 90 percent of which have also been optimized for split-screen and multi-window modes.
Tecno Phantom V Fold price & availability
So how much more affordable is the Tecno Phantom V Fold? Well, is not that bad when compared to other foldables.
The base model with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage will go for $1,099 (approximately Ksh. 140,000), whereas the 512GB variant is asking for $1,222 (approximately Ksh. 156,000).
These are very competitive when compared to Samsung and even Honor and Xiaomi outside of China.
However, these prices will vary across market regions and it will be interesting to see how Tecno will price the device in Kenya.
Availability update
Tecno has opened up pre-orders for the Phantom V Fold in Kenya. You can head over to Tecno’s official website to pre-order or any official Safaricom shop and selected Tecno shops.
Each pre-order gets you some goodies including a free Tecno smartwatch, a free Tecno backpack and 120GB of Safaricom data.
The pre-order period starts today (3rd April) to the 17th of this month.
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