The Phantom V Fold, Tecno’s first foldable smartphone, is up for pre-order in the country.
While the company is yet to share any statement with us regarding the same, it is already running social media campaigns on the pre-order and has the pre-orders open on its website, though we couldn’t click through to place an order. Branding there shows that Tecno is partnering with Safaricom to offer the device from its premium sub-brand.
The Phantom V Fold, announced at MWC 2023 back in February, was expected to launch in Kenya a few days ago, at the end of March. It looks like that timeline got extended a bit given that the pre-order period just started today and is expected to run through to April 17th, when we expect the device to be available in the open market.
As previously noted, the Phantom V Fold has a 7.85-inch AMOLED 2K main display and a 6.4-inch AMOLED Full HD+ “sub-screen” or what Samsung would call a “cover screen”. Both displays have up to 120Hz refresh rate. It is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 9000+ chipset. It packs a duo of 50-megapixel cameras for the main sensor and the portrait lens and a third 13-megapixel ultrawide at the back, a 16-megapixel selfie camera on the main display and another 32-megapixel selfie camera on the “sub-screen”, a 5,000mAh battery (with support for 45W fast charging), 12GB RAM, 512GB internal storage. It runs on Android 13 with Tecno’s HiOS.
While the pricing of the device in the Kenyan market is still anyone’s guess, we expect it to be significantly lower than the starting price of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4, the Phantom V Fold’s formidable rival in the foldable smartphone market locally.
Much as there are foldable smartphones from a host of device makers with a significant presence in the Kenyan market (Oppo, vivo, Xiaomi…), only Samsung has had the guts to successively parade its foldables here. Huawei has tried to do so with a very expensive device, easily the most expensive we’ve seen around, and we don’t know how that is going given that we haven’t seen the brand shout from the rooftops about it or even tip us about the device’s availability. Huawei offers an earlier version of the foldable in question for about Kshs 100,000 less as well as a Galaxy Z Flip competitor, the Huawei P50 Pocket.
The IDC projects that foldable smartphone costs will go down by 6.8% by the end of the year with shipments for foldable smartphones going up by more than 50% in a year when overall smartphone shipments are expected to contract by 1.1%.
Update: Thursday, 6th April 2023
Tecno has officially announced this pre-order at an event we attended in Nairobi. The device will be officially launched on April 18th. While the company remains mum on the pricing, expect it to keep the USD 1,000 price the device is going for elsewhere in the world.
