Tecno Camon iClick Review: Best Smartphone In Its Category?

Tecno Mobile- a subsidiary of Chinese electronics giant Transsion Holdings, recently launched a budget camera-centric smartphone Tecno Camon iClick in India. The handset is priced at Rs 13,999 and comes in two body colours- champagne gold and midnight black. The segment where the new Tecno mobile sits is very crowded in India with a lot of options a new smartphone being launched every week. 

We used Tecno Camon iClick for a few days and here's what we think about the new Tecno mobile.
 

Design and Display

Tecno Camon iClick is a tall device, it features a 6-inches HD+ (1440x720) display with 18:9 aspect ratio and 83.9 percent screen-to-body ratio. Even the screen size is large but the phone isn’t very huge and fits in the palm very easily, which is all due to 18:9 display. The handset measures 158.6 x 75.8 x 7.8mm and only weighs 150 grams. The auto brightness on the display works fine and it is easily visible in the direct sunlight.

The phone’s body is made of plastic which makes it very light in weight. Also, the matte finish gives the handset a metallic feel.

Tecno Camon iClick has a big chin below the display which could have easily housed the capacitive buttons but the chin is empty and its presence seems useless. The top bezel incorporates earpiece, selfie camera, LED flash and proximity sensor.

The volume buttons, power button, and dual-SIM + MicroSD card tray sits on the right side of the phone. Micro-USB port, speaker grille and 3.5mm headphone jack are placed on the bottom.

The handset’s back seems to be inspired from OnePlus 5, the single rear camera sits at the top left with fingerprint sensor at the centre.

Performance

The new Tecno mobile runs on HiOS v3.3.0 which is based on Android 8.0 Oreo. The handset is powered by a MediaTek Helio P23 processor which has eight ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores. It has 4GB RAM and 64GB of internal storage, out of which users will get 54.66GB of storage. There is also a dedicated MicroSD card slot with which the storage can be expanded up to 128GB.

HiOS isn’t clean as stock Android but it isn’t loaded with much bloatware too. It comes with pre-loaded apps like Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

There’s also a WhatsApp mode, once enabled, the data for other apps is restricted and prioritised for WhatsApp, Music and Downloads.

For security, the latest Tecno mobile comes with face unlock and fingerprint sensor, both features work effectively well. Fingerprint sensor is a common feature with every budget phone these days but a fast face unlock feature like the one in Tecno Camon iClick is a rare thing in smartphones with this price tag.

HiOS also features some gestures like you can silence the incoming calls by covering the screen with your palm, take screenshot by sliding down three fingers on the screen, control music playback by specific gesture with your finger over the off-screen.

There wasn’t any lag while using the phone. Multitasking, switching between apps or playing games, this phone steers every app smoothly. During my usage, it achieved a score of 86,162 on AnTuTu, while it scored 846 and 3674 on Geekbench’s Single-core and Multi-core, respectively.

Camon iClick is powered by a 3,750mAh battery which reaches from zero to hundred percent in more than 2 hours. The battery backup with this device is quite good. With normal usage, you’ll need to plug in your charger by end of the day. Vivo also offers low power mode and super-power saving mode to control power consumption.

Connectivity options include- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Location, 4G VoLTE, USB OTG, 3.5mm headphone-jack.

Tecno Camon iClick sports a 16-megapixels rear camera with f/1.8 aperture and LED flash. The rear camera works fine during daylight but its performance deteriorates when it comes to low-lighting conditions. There is Beauty Mode, Panorama, HDR, Super Pixel and different filters. Tecno also touted AI scene recognition but to be honest, I didn't find any visible recognition of any scene while I was taking pictures. On the front is a 20-megapixels selfie shooter with f/2.0 aperture, Panorama,Beauty mode and LED flash. The selfies clicked were quite good and front flash also kicks in during dimly lit locations. 

With a pleothra of smartphones in the budget segment of Indian market, Tecno Camon iClick is just another addition which hits many right spots and misses a few. The new Tecno mobile is equipped with 18:9 ratio display, latest Android 8.0 Oreo, smooth performance, decent camera quality, snappy fingerprint sensor and face recognition.  

Camon iClick doen’t have any feature which could make it stand out in the crowd, and if you are spending Rs 13,999, you would expect a metal body, dual rear camera and a higher resolution display.

At this price range, many other options are available like Moto G6, RealMe 1, Asus ZenFone Max Pro, and Redmi Note 5 Pro among others.