Tecno is now officially selling its first foldable smartphone, the Phantom V Fold, in Kenya.
The device had been under pre-order in the country since the first week of April with buyers putting down Kshs 5,000 at the time with the remaining amount being settled at this time when the device is available for purchase. Tecno also offered a bunch of goodies to pre-order customers.
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 which sees the device go from nothing to 40% in just 15 minutes and fully charged in 55 minutes), 12GB RAM, 256 and/or 512GB internal storage.
It runs on Android 13 with Tecno’s HiOS. However, this is not just any HiOS, not the one that we can see and interact with on other Tecno and Phantom devices. According to Tecno, the Phantom V Fold runs a special type of HiOS: HiOS 13 Fold, “a highly optimized and customized operating system based on Google’s Android 13, specially designed for the foldable device”. This allows such features as split screens, picture-in-picture, parallel windows and the ability to drag and drop elements across screens, as one would want to do on such a large canvas.
According to Tecno, the Phantom V Fold should last for well over 200,000 folds.
Tecno says that over 2,000 applications have been adapted for HiOS 13 Fold. That is to say that most of those apps have been tested and proven to be able to play nice with a foldable smartphone’s features like supporting split screens of that nature, multi-window modes, etc. We got a demonstration of these features at the pre-order launch of the device on April 6th and we were blown away – if anyone from Samsung is reading this, they should be very afraid.
“The development of Phantom V Fold reflects Tecno’s intensive efforts to bring desirable, high-end technologies to frontier markets through its Phantom sub-brand,” a statement from Tecno says.
Pricing for the Phantom V Fold starts at just over Kshs 150,000 for the base model with 256GB internal storage and goes all the way to just over Kshs 167,000 for the 512GB model. Our pricing factors in the necessary 16% VAT which is excluded from the pricing information shared with us by Tecno (Kshs 130,000 for the 256GB model and Kshs 144,000 for the 512GB model).
The device is available at Safaricom retail outlets across the country as well as select Tecno brand stores and online through the Phantom website.
