Hong Kong-headquarter, Tecno Mobile has recently introduced its selfie-centric smartphone, Tecno Camon iClick for the Indian market. At a price tag of Rs 13,999, the handset will be available in Midnight Black and Champagne Gold colour options in more than 35,000 retail stores in the country.
With this, the brand wants to compete against the well established selfie-centric smartphone manufacturers under the budget segment. We got some time to spend with the device and here are our first impressions.
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Meanwhile, the smartphone comes loaded with a cashback offer from Vodafone. Through this, Vodafone users will get a cashback coupon worth Rs 2,200 along with free subscription of Vodafone Play for 3 months. The offer is valid until August 30. Further, the phone comes with 111 policy. Under this, Tecno is offering 100 days’ replacement warranty, one-time screen replacement, and one-month extended warranty on the Camon iClick.
Display and Design
Starting with the design, the Tecno Camon iClick is based on thenew design language (Picture Gallary) with minimal bezels. At the front, the device features a 6-inch HD+ display with the screen Resolution of 1440 x 720 pixels and 18:9 aspect ratio. The forehead houses a selfie camera, Dual-LED flash, earpiece and proximity sensor, while the chin area is kept ideal due to on-screen navigation controls.
Moving to the back of iClick, the device features a reinforced plastic with a metallic finish at the rear. It’s a little surprising that at this price point, Tecno features a single rear camera setup with Quad-LED flash, however, other smartphone brands like Asus and Xiaomi have all moved to a dual-setup in Zenfone Max Pro M1 and Note 5 Pro. Further, talking about the side, the brand has decided to keep the left and top profile clean. While the right has the volume rockers, power switch, and the 3-Slot SIM tray, which allows you to use two SIM as well as a micro-SD card at the same time. The bottom houses the micro-USB port, 3.5mm Headphone jack and the speaker grill.
As as far as design is considered, the smartphone definitely feels premium and even comfortable to hold. Other than this, the iClick comes with an amazing build quality, as it took us at latest 5 to 6 minutes, to identify whether the smartphone is made of metal or plastic. However, in terms of display we were disappointed due to its HD+ screen, one can easily spot the dullness along with the washed out colours and low contrast ratio, it would have been great if the brand could have used a Full HD+ panel.
Hardware and Software
The Tecno Camon iClick is powered by a 2.0 GHz Quad-core MediaTek Helio P23 octa-core Processor with the Mali-G71 GPU. It is backed up by 4GB of RAM and 64GB internal storage, which is can be further expanded via using a microSD card. In terms of performance, it will be too soon to make any verdict, however, in our initial testing, the smartphone performed well without any sign of lagging or overheating.
Moving to the software part, the smartphone runs on the Android 8.1 Oreo operating system which is based on the brand’s customized HiOS 3.3 skin. In our initial impression, the user interface is highly animated, responsive and customizable. It features an app drawer where applications are sorted in Alphanumeric order. On the right one will find the characters drawer which eases the process of finding a particular app.
Further, in the app drawer, the user will also find a recent or often used application tab in which the UI advertises a random application every time you access the drawer. In terms of bloatware, the Tecno has surely surpassed the Xiaomi’s MIUI, as the device comes with the dozen of those, including the Carlcare, Hi Theme, Phone Master, PHX Browser, Face ID, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and more.
Other than this, the smartphone comes with the feature of Face Unlock and fingerprint sensor both. The Face Unlock of the device is highly responsive with no noticeable lags, while the fingerprint sensor showed some delays
Camera, Battery and Connectivity
Since the Tecno Camon iClick is a selfie-centric smartphone it comes with a 20-megapixel front camera with the Dual-LED flash, while on the rear one will get a 16-megapixel sensor with the Quad-LED flash. In our initial testing, the smartphone performed amazingly is daylight conditions with accurate colours and detailing was to the point. We will talk about this in detail in our device review.
As far as camera UI is concerned, it is really simple and hosts various features like Phase detection, autofocus, 5 level Face Beauty, HDR, Portrait mode and filters for the selfie camera. Further, one can switch among various modes like Video, Normal, Beauty, Panorama and Super Pixel, which captures sharp, clear and detailed pictures (Only available for rear camera).
The device packs a 3750 mAh battery that the brand claims to give 420 hours of standby time, 30 hours calling, 23 hours battery life, 11 hours web browsing, 13 hours video playback and 9 hours gaming. On the connectivity front, it supports 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Dual-SIM and Micro USB port.