TECNO Camon 16 Premier Impressions

The TECNO Camon 16 Premier is here.

It brings some key upgrades to the table, but do they make it a better device than the Camon 15 it is succeeding? Mostly, yes, and we are glad the honed upgrades are here.

Before we go too far, here are the device’s specs:

Unboxing

The unboxing experience has not changed. You get all the usual materials:

• The phone itself
• User manuals
• Warranty cards
• Charging brick (33W) and a USB C cable
• Set of re-designed earphones
• Silicon case

Looking at the specs, it is apparent that TECNO has tried to make the Camon 16 Premier as appealing and upgrade-worthy as possible.

I will start with the battery, which, when I unboxed the phone, was t 40 percent. After setting it up (emails, syncing information and searching for upgrades, and updating and downloading new apps), the device had enough juice to keep lights on until 10 PM.

It is also worth noting that the entire setting up exercise was a breeze – and was happy with the performance because the process of syncing data and updating apps while using the phone to do other things is taxing to the CPU – and it didn’t break a sweat.

I plugged in the device at 5 percent and went on to do other things, and about 40 minutes later, it was at 80%, which is quite impressive. The only other device that I recall was this good is the vivo V19, but that phone is way pricier.

There is no denying that the Camon 16 Premier is a big phone, and compact-phone lovers are not going to be comfortable with the size and mass. But, are there any small phones out there anymore?

At 6.9”, the display is among the largest for smartphones selling in Kenya (the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and Galaxy S20 Ultra are equally huge with the same screen size). The good thing is that it is beautiful for the price, and hey, it refreshes at 90 Hz so for those who are keen, you are going to see better smoothness when scrolling through content.

The software situation remains the same as other TECNO devices. The OS, Android 10, has been skinned with HiOS, which is a way manufacturer adds features to bare-bones Android. HiOS has tens of useful features and settings. It also brings in a lot of other apps that you are not going to use, but the good thing is that you can uninstall the majority. Those that run as system apps can still be disabled.

However, I suspect some customers are not going to do all that because the exercise may be taxing. In some cases, some of the included apps are going to sneak in ads to your notification window – and considering you are paying KES 28500 for the phone, it is something you hoped TECNO would have fixed by now.

But the phone punches above its price, and we understand why the company is trying to make extra cash for bringing you the entire package for that asking price that could be higher had other established players replicated it.

Another important thing to note is about RAM. We have 8 GB this time around, which is more than any customer would ask for for the price. It means that you can hold many apps in memory without the device slowing down or kicking other apps out of memory, hence, switching between them should be a breeze.

The only thing we haven’t tested so far is the camera. We will have more to say about them in the coming days, and we are positive about the outcome considering TECNO has tuned the optics both from the hardware and software standpoints.

We will be back with additional details during our full assessment.