Tecno has officially unveiled its 2021 flagship smartphone, the Phantom X.
At a colourful event in Nairobi, the brand, which has for several years running dominated the continent’s top smartphone sales charts, revealed the device which it also says is now part of a new flagship sub-brand dubbed, well, Phantom.
The Phantom X features a 6.7-inch display, a MediaTek Helio G95 chipset, 8GB RAM, 256GB onboard storage, a 4,700mAh battery that is juiced up quickly thanks to the 33W fast charger included in the box (Tecno says that one can get 70% charge from a 30-minute top-up).
Some of the notable upgrades to the Phantom X, when pitted against what we saw on the Phantom 8, the last member of the Phantom series include both the storage and the memory. The display, also, gets a big bump not just in the physical size but also the technology behind it. It is now a Super AMOLED panel with a high refresh rate (90Hz) to move with the times and, most notably, it is curved, cementing the “3D borderless design” that the device’s marketing material mentions.
The star of the show on the device is its five cameras – 2 on the front and 3 at the back.
The front-facing duo of the Phantom X’s 48-megapixel and 8-megapixel lenses, which pair up to produce clear selfies, is matched at the back by a trio of 50, 13 and 8-megapixel shooters that truly come to life in low-light scenes thanks to improvements in the Super Night feature that Tecno has been shipping on its devices for a while now and making the camera experience complete.
Using the cameras, users can not only take impressive snaps at night, but they can also capture timelapses in 4K and shoot slow-motion videos in 960 frames per second.
On the software front, the Phantom X is powered by HiOS 7.6 which is based on Android 11. What that means, as we have noted before, is that users can expect the same features they have come to know from Tecno’s custom Android overlay. From our hands-on with the device over the last few days, there are couple of touch-ups and additions that make the experience a little exclusive to the Phantom X, at least for now.
Top on that list of new additions is Ella, Tecno’s new voice assistant that is making a debut on the Phantom X. Though it is still in its early days, the voice assistant can do simple tasks like answering queries about the weather and other general knowledge questions in addition to making calls, sending messages, and the like. Heck, Ella can even turn on the FM radio if one has wired headsets connected.
The Phantom X is going for Kshs 50,000 in online and physical stores countrywide.
At the event, there was no mention of the Phantom X Pro that was recently listed on Google’s list of supported ARCore devices. Will we get to see it?
