It has been a year since the Phantom 5 and now its replacement, the TECNO Phantom 6, is here. How much of an improvement over the 5 is the 6? Our Phantom 6 review brings you all the juicy detail. Just so you can compare, here is our TECNO Phantom 5 review from last year.
TECNO Phantom 6 Review: Quick Specs
– Dimensions: 151.5 x 75.5 x 6.15 mm
– Display: 5.5-inch, 1080 x 1920 pixels (401 PPI), AMOLED touchscreen, with Gorilla Glass 3
– Processor Type: 64 Bit Octa-core 2.0 GHz CPU
– RAM: 3 GB
– Storage: 32GB + dedicated MicroSD card slot up to 128GB
– Camera: 13 megapixel, autofocus + 5 MP fixed focus rear camera with dual LED flash, 1080P HD video. 8 megapixel selfie camera with soft flash
– Battery: Non-removable 2,770 mAh
– Iris Sensor
You can get the full Phantom 6 specs.
TECNO Phantom 6 Review: Design
Like its predecessor, the Phantom 6 is a beautifully crafted smartphone. The Phantom 6 is more beautiful, though. It has a sleek metal build that is slim and lightweight. The Phantom 6’s 6.15 mm thickness is slimmer than the Phantom 5’s 6.8 mm thickness. The display is the same 5.5-inch size as the Phantom 5. It has the same resolution and same Gorilla Glass 3.
The Phantom 3 uses the new USB Type-C port. TECNO smartly included a Type-C adaptor in the sales box, such that you can use any regular microUSB cable with the phone.
TECNO Phantom 6 Review: Software
Running under the hood of the Phantom 6 is Android 6 Marshmallow with HiOS. However, the HiOS user interface wears a new look here. This time, it is a dark look. And it looks good. Set up your Gmail account to get your Google email, calendar, and contacts synchronizing. Everything works just fine.
Phantom 6 Review: Network, Calls And 4G Compatibility
The Phantom 6 is dual SIM. Call clarity is good, though. Conversations are clear and deep. As is custom with TECNO, the Phantom 6 lets you peg network to 2G, 3G, 4G, or auto, so it switches network based on signal availability and strength. In our 4G tests, the Phantom 6 worked with Smile, Ntel, and MTN 4G networks. You can read details of our Phantom 6 4G tests.
There has been no improvement in signal reception capabilities since the Boom and Camon series released this year. In fringe areas, it isn’t very good at holding on to stray signals. We’ve seen worse from other brands, so the Phantom 6 gets an average score here.
Phantom 6 Review: Multimedia
The beautiful, large display of the Phantom 6 is a joy to view images and videos on. Playing a video or audio via the built-in loudspeaker, one is immediately wowed by the depth of audio quality from the device. The Phantom 6’s loudspeaker is awesome. Using the bundled headset, one gets very good audio quality too. So, the Phantom 6 is a top multimedia device.
TECNO’s built-in Boom Player lets you search for, stream and download music by African artistes. It also notifies you of new music when they are available. In addition, it gives you the lyrics of tracks that you are playing (if available), and also lets you edit the meta details of each music file. User registration is available, so you can post comments. You can also share your music to social networks. It is a beautiful piece of work.
TECNO Phantom 6 Review: Photography
The Phantom 5 has dual rear cameras, comprising a 13 megapixel autofocus camera and a 5 megapixel fixed focus camera. There is a dual tone, dual LED flash to help with low-light situations.
In practice, what is the impact of the dual camera? The dual camera setup makes it possible to add a Bokeh effect to pictures taken in Refocus mode. How it works is that after taking a photo in that mode, you can edit it to focus on a section of the photo and blur out everything else. Here is a sample shot:
The Phantom 6 takes good low-light photographs. Here are a few samples from the rear camera in low-light. One was taken with flash and the other with no flash:
And here is a macro shot, taken indoors with flash on:
Here is a selfie from the front-facing camera:
The Phantom 6 is undoubtedly a very good and versatile camera phone.
TECNO Phantom 6 Review: Performance
One huge weakness of the TECNO Phantom 5 was the measly 1.3 GHz processor. The Phantom 6 improves on that significantly with a Helio P10 octa-core 2.0 GHz processor. I am a happy bunny. The Phantom 6 is a capable performer and is far superior to its predecessor in the performance field. For multitasking, I was hoping that it would do much better, but it has the Phantom 5’s 3GB of RAM too. Oh, well.
For example, playing Spider-Man Unlimited on it was smooth and without hiccups. Mobile gamers will love the phantom 6. You can also check out our performance benchmark test results. There’s 32GB internal storage and a slot for microSD card of up to 128GB. The phone also supports USB-on-the-go and I have been able to use my flash drives with it without issues.
TECNO Phantom 6 Review: Iris Sensor
There is no fingerprint sensor here. But there is an iris (eye) scanner similar to what obtains on the Camon C9 (TECNO Camon C9 review). It works well.
TECNO Phantom 6 Review: Battery Life
We wish we can say that the Phantom 6 runs for a full work day of moderate use. Unfortunately, it does not. That 2,770 mAh battery is just inadequate to keep the 5.5-inch display and 2.0 GHz processor going for that long. This battery will need topping up somewhere before you are ready to head home. And should you be in dire straits, the Ultra Power Savings (UPS) mode is amazing. It can easily give you extra hours of battery life if you activate it when you are running out of power or when you are not using the phone.
TECNO Phantom 6 Review: Verdict
TECNO Phantom 6 is a beautiful, well-built smartphone. It is more beautiful, slimmer, more powerful, and is better at photography than its predecessor. However, it is let down a little by the smaller capacity battery. The Phantom 6 costs N95,000 in the retail market. It would probably cost as much as N15,000 less if TECNO had not gone splurging on the unnecessarily large packaging (see photo below or our unboxing photos for more pictures).
PS: Don’t miss out on our Phantom 5 versus Phantom 6 comparison or our Phantom 6 versus phantom 6 Plus comparison.
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