TECNO Phantom 8 Review: A Sequel Metamorphosing into a Beast!

The Phantom 8, launched on October 22, looks more expensive than its predecessors’ thanks to its impressive build quality, and its powerful specs.

I had the pleasure of using the phone for a week and here’s a full review. Enjoy!

Design
The Phantom is draped in a full metal body that helps confer a premium look and bolster the attractiveness and a 5.7 Full HD screen with a 1920 x 1080 pixels display resolution fixed on its surface with a 2.5D curved edge glass. The colors on the display are just simply beautiful, Tecno did a good job at this. While watching videos on the phablet was enjoyable since you could since all the colors, the blacks were blacks though the saturation was fair enough.

The visual highlight of the device is its unique ‘Diamond Fire Design’ that leaves the device glossy and a thing of true beauty. It comes in three different colors: Champagne Gold, Phantom Black, and Galaxy Blue colors.

The smartphone is 7.9mm thick, slimmer than the Samsung Galaxy S8 (8mm).

The Phantom 8 has three basic navigation keys in the lower front bezel while the fingerprint scanner is centrally placed at the back below the camera region.

Below the screen are 3 capacitive soft key buttons: the app switch key, the home key, and the return key.

OS
The Tecno Phantom 8 brags Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box with HiOS 3.0 on top – promising more optimized and sleeker user interface.

The icons on the HiOS 3.0 are sleek, spontaneous and offer more interaction. The new OS also comes with a couple of themes that offer richer customization.

Camera
Flying in with a 12MP + 13MP dual cameras at the rear with 10x super zoom, single shot HDR, “4 in 1” skin brightening technology, real-time refocus and filter, ultra-quality super pixel lens with great noise control.

The Phantom 8 also got an exciting new selfie camera makeover – debuting an impressive 20MP bright front Camera alongside a smart dual selfie flash. The double front ring flash ensures that you can capture your legend anywhere even in a low light environment so that no moment goes uncaptured.

Tecno added one other feature to its camera dubbed “the super pixel mode” which gives you absolutely amazing picture view. They are sharp and crisp. However, to use this feature, one of the requirements is for one to be really stable just like using a tripod on a DSLR camera while shooting say a scene.

Performance
The Phantom 8 is armed with a roaring 6GB RAM to see all your multitasking needs, this is the first Tecno device to come with that RAM capacity. And a built-in storage of 64GB which is quite enough for all the apps you could need as well as your photos and videos, but is still expandable up to 2TB via Micro SD card.

With a 2.6 GHz MediaTek Helio P25 processor for an ultra-fast experience that supports 4G+ at a downloadable speed up to 300Mbps.

With such performance, you can bid farewell to any wasted time while launching apps, multitasking or playing a resource demanding mobile game.

Battery
The Phantom 8 comes with a medium capacity built-in battery at 3500mAh with a 50% extra ultra-fast charge capacity, all of which ensures that the device is faster and consumes less energy. The fast charger could get you from 2% to a full charge within 2 to 2 and half hours which is really impressive.

If you’re a moderate user, a single charge can take you upto two (2) days.

Pricing and availability
The Tecno Phantom 8 is priced at UGX. 1,220,000 and is available at all TECNO branded shops like Banana Phone World, Hello Mobile, Cross River, Rock Unlimited, Mob Phones among others, as well as online on Jumia.

What we liked

1. Both cameras (the rear and front camera) are really promising, they show details on the subject taken. Plus its auto focus feature gives the camera a 100% go on – allowing users to take photos with blur backgrounds..
2. The build quality.
3. The display.

What we didn’t like

1. The huge bezels on the front of the device –  should have gone with smaller or no bezels at all since most firms are now doing away with it.
2. The earphones/headsets that come with the phone.

Photos by @penywaru