TECNO Camon 16 Premier Review

The Tecno Camon 16 Premier went on sale in the Kenyan market about three weeks ago. The device is a direct successor to the Camon 15 Premier launched earlier this year and is probably the best device we have seen and used from Tecno this year.

We already did the unboxing for you which you can check out below.

The device being a direct successor to the Camon 15 Premier, there’s not much of a big difference in the specs, but there are also some significant differences. Worthy to mention is that the Camon 16 Premier is introducing some distinctive features in the entire Camon series including the 90Hz display refresh rate and 33W fast charging technology.

Design and Display

When it comes to the design, Camon 16 is totally different from what we have seen in all Tecno devices in the Camon series. The review unit we had, had a Glacial Silver model which looked pretty good with a  pill-shaped hole punch on the front and a wide rectangular camera bump placed on the centre top at the back.

Tecno also integrated the fingerprint scanner to the power button at the right-hand side. The left side houses the Dual-SIM tray. At the bottom, you have the 3.5mm port, USB Type-C port, a microphone, and the speakers located at the far left. 

The TECNO Camon 16 Premier features a 6.9-inch FHD+ 90Hz display. Well, this is huge and is one of the distinctive features that Tecno introduced to this device compared to what we saw on the Camon 15 Premier. 

With the display set at 90Hz, it means you’ll have a good smartphone experience which you will definitely enjoy as scrolling through the app drawer, images and webpages is much smoother and faster. 

Cameras

Tecno again tried to put so much emphasis on the camera function with the Camon 16 Premier. IT packs a 64-megapixel primary camera on the rear with an f/1.89 aperture; a second 8-megapixel camera with an f/2.25 aperture; a third 2-megapixel camera with an f/2.4 aperture and a fourth 2-megapixel camera with an f/1.8 aperture.

On the front, the Tecno Camon 16 Premier packs a 48-megapixel primary camera with an f/2.2 aperture and a second 8-megapixel camera with an f/2.2 aperture.

We have a separate article on the cameras coming up where we will be talking about the camera and sharing all our favourite photos we took with the Camon 16 Premier. 

Performance, Software and battery life

The Tecno Camon 16 Premier has MediaTek’s Helio G90T processor under the hood with an Octa-core CPU that maxes out at 2.05GHz.  We also saw this in some other devices we reviewed at this price range, e.g. the Infinix ZERO 8 and the realme 6. Well, this chipset is a beast and works just well, there’s nothing really to complain about here. 

The performance is quite impressive and the phone is able to handle day to day tasks with no lags.

The Tecno Camon 16 Premier is based on Android 10 and packs 128GB of inbuilt storage that can be expanded via microSD card (up to 512GB). We’re also getting some 8GB of memory. 

The device also comes with Tecno’s in-house UI, HiOS 7 which we have previously interacted with. It is highly customized but there are lots of bloatware and some unnecessary apps and is also ridden with so many ads.  This can be annoying but the good thing is you can always turn off, uninstall or even disable them.  

The phone also ships with a 4500mAh battery and supports proprietary fast charging. The battery performance is fantastic and if you have been using Tecno phones you know the company always gets everything right here. 

With the 33W fast-charger it takes just an hour to fully charge up the device. This is impressive. 

Did we like the Tecno Camon 16 Premier? 

The Tecno Camon 16 Premier is a good device and just as we said at the beginning of this article, it’s probably the best we have seen from Tecno this year. 

The display and overall design is good and the cameras are also amazing. We loved the long battery life and the fast charging was everything. These are the features that would actually make us spend some Ksh.28,500 on the Tecno Camon 16 Premier. 

The downside is just the software. Honestly, the bloatware, adds and frequent notifications completely spoils the user experience on a pretty good device. The ads are everywhere and Tecno really needs to do something about this. 

For its price though, the Tecno Camon 16 Premier goes head to head with a number of competitors like the recently launched realme 6 and  the Infinix ZERO 8. We did a comparison article between the device and the realme 6 which you can read here.

Tecno Camon 16 Premier Specs

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