First Impressions With The TECNO Phantom A Smartphone

We’ve had a unit of the TECNO Phantom A smartphone released earlier this month for a few weeks now and here are our first impressions about the company’s flagship device.

he dual-SIM smartphone comes with a 5-inch capacitive touch screen (although it looks slimmer than the Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos 5-inch screen), runs on Android OS 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean) and powered by a 1 Ghz dual-core processor alongside a 4GB internal memory (upgradeable to 32GB) and 1GB of RAM.
The smartphone’s screen and keyboard makes for easy viewing and typing, browsing sites and watching videos. It spots a decent 8MP camera at the back that takes great shots, although when you move the camera about it gets blurry until you keep the smartphone still before you can take a good shot. Still, its 1.2MP front-facing camera isn’t that impressive and didn’t do well when we tried Skype calls.

Speaking about Skype on the Phantom A, we found that the video call quality wasn’t excellent, not because of the mobile network, but due to the fact that Skype is yet to certify the Phantom A for video calls, as we learnt.

We couldn’t also download Gtalk (now Hangouts) on the Phantom A as the smartphone appears incompatible with the chat app, but other social networking and IM apps such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, etc works fine. We’re yet to test PalmChat on the Phantom A.

On the other hand, we enjoyed playing 3D games such as Asphalt Car Racing on the Phantom A which provides a great experience. See this video demo below showing a 30-sec car racing session on the TECNO Phantom A.

Sadly, even with the Phantom A’s battery capacity at 2100 mAh (the same as the Galaxy Grand’s), the smartphone really doesn’t impress in the battery department for a smartphone of its kind, although on full charge, it lasted for about 10 hours, while running on network data with moderate use of emails, social networking, gaming etc based on our initial test.

Still on the battery department, the Phantom A seems to take eternity to charge up the battery full, but we found it to be 100% fully charged from a 0% drained battery in about 4 hours, unlike other smartphones which take about 2 hours or less.

So far, we can say that the Phantom A is a good device, even as it is priced at half the cost of other smartphones in its category. We would recommend the TECNO Phantom A to anyone looking for a high-end, yet low-cost smartphone.
See the gallery below for images of the un-boxing and hands-on with the Phantom A smartphone.