TECNO Camon CX review – Let’s take more selfies

TECNO Camon CX was launched as an addition to the Camon series, the third iteration and the successor to the Camon C9 which was announced last year. TECNO has positioned the Camon devices to cater for the photo junkie, not only that, it also falls within a budget so users have certain level of satisfaction from owning the device.

Apparently keeping up with this customer satisfaction is the reason TECNO keeps stepping things up on successive products as obtained in the design of the Camon CX. If you haven’t seen our unboxing and first impression piece, you can look it up here

Design

TECNO scaled up the Camon CX in the design department, definitely not the kind we expected from the Camon series. A sleek that befits a premium phone, the TECNO Camon CX just takes on a metallic casing, slim body and an overall comfortable grip.

So because the Camon CX is a camera phone, you can’t help but notice the conspicuous 16MP camera and a dual flash at the front. Although the front is just as plain as can be, the back is more attractive; with the metal casing, 16MP camera and a LED sitting at the top left corner and the finger print sensor right below.

The fingerprint sensor is the security feature on the CX, and the first time it will be appearing on a Camon device. I am particularly glad that the fingerprint has been used to replace the Eyeprint security which was on the Camon C9, a bootless feature that hardly anyone who’s had the Camon C9 uses. Apart from the security function of the fingerprint scanner, it has a touch function which permits users to accept in-coming calls and to take pictures by placing a finger on the scanner.

TECNO keeps satisfying the need for dual SIM die-hards. On this device, there is a SIM tray that takes up two SIM cards and a separate memory card slot for memory expansion.

The design also did away with the dual speaker grill, now there’s just one speaker right at the base of the device beside the USB/charging port while the navigation keys are now placed on-screen.

Display

The display is also impressive at 5.5-inches with full HD resolution. Not only is the display bright enough that cranking the brightness to maximum was no use, colours look balanced and natural compared to previous TECNO devices where colours are sometimes over saturated. Multimedia experience is also fanciful with impressive viewing angles and loud audio to complement the viewing experience.

Visibility under the sun is also good as long as the brightness is set beyond the minimum or allowed to automatically adjust itself. All through my time with the device, I set the brightness at the mid-level but turned it to the minimum only at night.

Camera

Being a dedicated camera phone, one would probably be prompted to always take more pictures. Pictures and selfie lovers would love the photo capabilities like being able to take photos at night without worry – all thanks to the dual LED flash beside the 16MP front camera. Selfies can be taken comfortably at night; however the back camera does an average job at 16MP with 4 LED lights in the flashlight compartment. TECNO calls this Ring flash.

Photos taken with the back camera under abundant lighting conditions look sharp and brightly coloured with very reduced noise levels. Low light pictures aren’t so bad, they still come out with some level of digital noise.

Picture resolutions are also high such that at full zoom into the image, little or no quality is lost to noise or pixelation. 

I took a picture of my meal at one eat out, see picture below:-

…and below is a fully zoomed in image of the same picture looking almost detailed without losing much of its quality.

TECNO somehow didn’t get pro camera settings hounds like me too excited because manual settings on the camera are yet to be enabled. If only we had the freedom to adjust ISO, shutter speed, white balance among other settings, it would have passed as an ultimate camera but they redeem the brand to a certain degree where the option to switch camera resolutions so as to adjust picture sizes are added.

Now that we all enjoy making memes and photo filters, the Camon CX camera may just ease us the stress of depending on third party apps to create our personalized memes and filters with its built-in customized portrait filter. (Text in image below can be edited)

Features, performance and battery

The Camon CX runs on Android Nougat 7.0 with an overlay of TECNO’s proprietary HiOS interface. The feel of HiOS on this device looks different from other devices running the same UI, perhaps TECNO keeps working and improving on the UI upon every device till it gets a satisfactory review, however it doesn’t look so bad from where we stand (😊) with a bright coloured theme albeit basic and flat.

On the default home screen, Boomplay window for quick access to the music player has been replaced. What you now have is a window split into two comprising of ‘commonly used apps’ and ‘Headlines’. The former pulls up the four most used app while the latter aggregates news headlines from various websites. I didn’t find this fascinating because I was stuck with the default news sources without the freedom to choose the news sources I wanted.

Lock screen notification which was long absent is now available – Ahh! Thank you TECNO

The device has a 1.5GHz Octa-core processor while RAM size is 2GB and internal memory is 16GB. While some will opine that 16GB is small, don’t forget that there is a memory card slot with which you can slam a memory card to increase memory to 128GB.

Battery capacity is 3,200mAh, not a bad one for a phone in this category. However since phone usage is relative, it may be difficult to assign a certain time span for phone battery. From my experience, the battery, on mild usage, ie email, calls, internet browsing and frequent instant messaging gave an average of 8 hours. It could be less for another person or more. , 

Tip: Phone battery depletes faster with more screen-on time.

My take

There is no gainsaying that the Camon CX is a device I’d recommend for anyone who is an acclaimed selfie king/queen. The 16MP front and back camera with very bright flash both do a good job of delivering quality photos. Apart from the camera, the device is pimped with an eye popping design, metal casing, slim body, comes quite handy and light weight.

While there could have been improvements in some functionalities of the phone, I find that the device impresses still and surprisingly, I cannot identify any major deal breaker.