Unboxing
Impressions
The Tecno Camon 16S has the unfortunate – or maybe fortunate – distinction of coming months after we looked at, and Tecno offer, the hero of the Camon 16 series, the Tecno Camon 16 Premier.
As such, it has much to live up to and much to gain as well given the Premier’s lofty focus which has a higher price tag to boot.
So, how does it fare?
That is the question I have been asking myself in the one week that I have been using the device. While I am still not at a point where I can adequately give an answer to that question, I have my quick impressions from my first week with the device:
- It’s lighter than the Tecno Camon 16 Premier. I don’t know by how much, but, holding the two, you can feel it. That has an impact on how the device ends up being handled. The lightness comes from a slightly smaller frame compared to its bulky sibling. The Camon 16S is just 0.5mm slimmer. It is also more compact and, obviously, smaller in size.
- There are visual design changes that one can’t miss. For instance, on the front, where a dual selfie shooter reigns supreme on the Camon 16 Premier, an 8-megapixel front-facing camera stands out on the Camon 16S to lend credence to the “Dot-In” marketing terminology that Tecno has employed this year to describe its cutout.
- Down at the bottom, the microUSB port for charging and data transfer is unmissable. The Camon 16 Premier, took the Camon series forward with some of its most standout feature additions in years but the Camon 16S compromises in order to keep things on the low.
- Talking about charging, I have observed that much as the life is commendable on the Tecno Camon 16S (as we will see in a separate article exploring the device’s standout features), the charging duration is for tears. Sure, the battery capacity is high enough (5,000mAh) and a little more than one gets on the Camon 16 Premier (4,500mAh) for one not to want to charge to 100% all the time (not recommended, by the way) but, when you have the time, you will spend more than 3 hours filling it up. Quite the wait, huh?
- As far as the software experience goes, as we note in our unboxing and first impressions video above (please watch and subscribe), there’s nothing new and/or outstanding. It’s the standard Tecno experience that we have seen on many other devices. Of course, it is optimized for the Camon 16S user experience as there have been no issues I have encountered while using it. It’s main pros like the added features on top of Android 10 are still very much the same. Its cons, like the annoying pop-up ads every few minutes and notification dropdown banners all the time, are also still there. As are system apps that probably ought not to be classed as such.
- At the back, that big central camera bump is replaced with a smaller left-sided one like the one we have seen on other Tecno devices like the Spark 5 Pro we reviewed recently.
- Of course, the fingerprint sensor shifts from the side, where it was housed as part of the power button on the Camon 16 Premier, to the back, right next to the camera bump.
Look out for more on the Tecno Camon 16S in coming days.
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