I have had the Tecno Pouvoir 4 with me for a few days now.
However, before I share my overall thoughts on the device in a review that is coming soon, I want to share my initial thoughts as soon as I unboxed it and over the few hours that followed.
Watch that unboxing here:
First things first, the Tecno Pouvoir 4 is not a small device, by any means. It’s a smartphone, sure, but if this was 2012, at 7-inches, we’d call it a tablet. It’s 2020, gladly, and a tablet it is not. It’s “just” a phone. A big big phone.
The most interesting thing about that is that after just a few hours of using it, that overwhelming feeling of handling what is essentially a pretty large device just disappears. It may come back should you pick another device, which will definitely have a smaller display.
For people with large hands, everything I have to say about the device’s Gargantuan size is irrelevant. They’re fine. For those with small and mid-sized hands, well, the button placement on the device is such that everything is easily accessible, even the volume up button.
Talking about buttons, one unmissable thing is the addition of a dedicated button to trigger the Google Assistant. It’s very well marked in red and you can’t miss it even though you may mistake it for a power button at first. It’s also textured, unlike the other buttons (power, volume down and volume up) on the right side of the device.
The big display leads to an even bigger device which means that the device maker had more room to work with than usual. The end result? An equally big battery. The need for that big battery is very simple: you need one to power a big display. The saving grace lies in the software optimizations that we have come to expect from Tecno. Sure, they can be annoying, especially when your app gets stopped in its track in order to optimize battery use but they work, for those that are concerned with getting the most runtime on a single charge. Then there’s the fact that the device isn’t pushing that many pixels – it’s only a HD+ panel, after all.
This has all meant that the advertised battery life is not a mirage. More on that in the review.
There’s also the four cameras at the back. Given this device’s pricing and what we know about smartphone cameras at this price point – where corners are cut – should you expect anything at all from it? We find out soon.
