When the Phantom 9 launched in Uganda, we were excited about it, the first impression was impressive but this does not tell it all. Today, we are here to expound more on where we left off with the first impressions by following it up with a full blown review.
What prompts anyone to buy a high-end smartphone in 2019? This includes the camera, battery, hardware, software, etc and we shall answer these in contrast with the Phantom 9, as it represents TECNO’s best of the line smartphone.
The Build and Hardware
The Phantom 9 improves a lot of what was missed with the Phantom 8 in terms of design. It has dropped the big bezels, adopted a waterdrop notch, added triple AI cameras (More on this later), expanded the ROM, added an AMOLED screen, now all SIM cards are Nano, in-display fingerprint reader, dual front flash among others.
Apart from what it brings on the table, which mostly prompts the meh with hardware is the dropping of USB-C in favor of Micro-USB. The reason for this could be to bring the Phantom 9 to a friendlier price territory as it retails for way fewer shillings than the Phantom 8 it replaces.
Generally, the Phantom 9 feels less heavy than it looks with its 6.4” FHD AMOLED screen. It has a polycarbonate glossy back which is a fingerprint magnet, I must warn. Its shifting color patterns make this a beauty to hold and look at. TECNO calls its Lapland Aurora or whatever that is but it is a pleaser.
As with any AMOLED screen, the screen is good to look at and makes you appreciate its deep blacks when watching content, to an extent that you might assume the phone is completely off when a black scene surfaces on its screen, On the contrary, it struggles with brightness outdoors in well-lit environs. This necessitates doing away with the default adaptive brightness in some instances. Other than that, everything worked just fine.
There was little disappointment with the in-display fingerprint scanner as it takes a little bit of time to register a fingerprint. We shall excuse TECNO for this since this is one of their first devices to feature this, and they are also trying to bring it down to this price point.
TECNO also added the 3.5mm headphone jack. While this died a natural death on other flagships, it is good to know that TECNO maintained it and for audio aficionados, they will thankfully appreciate it. What they won’t appreciate, however, are/is the speaker grill, located adjacent to the micro-USB charger. They didn’t sound the nicest and can easily be blocked.
Other button arrays are located on the right rail for volume rockers and the power button, the SIM card and Micro-USB expansion on the left.
The 30MP selfie shooter takes up the waterdrop notch space while the triple 16MP +2MP + 8MP takes up the back at the top right.
Software
We can at least agree that the hardware doesn’t work alone. These components work hand in hand with the software to see that everything responds as fine. The Phantom 9 comes with TECNO’s custom HiOS skin atop Android 9 Pie. HiOS affords you many customizations that are otherwise absent from the default Android. You can change fonts, themes, icons, icon trays plus other tweaks I can’t list here
Generally, the software experience was on par and worked fine with the computing power under the hood of the Phantom 9 coupled with AI capabilities that we are yet to expound on but first, the performance.
Performance
4GB is so 2019 and continuing in the 8’s steps, the Phantom 9 maintained 6GB of RAM plus 128GB of ROM. Both plenty but both did exactly fine. Animations were quick and responsive, hours of heavy casual gaming didn’t prove a heavy bite among others. Phantom 9’s performance is good at best and good at worst. I hope you get the gist?
The Cameras
On everyone’s list of smartphone buys, the camera reigns supreme. The Phantom 9 has 4 of these cameras. A wonderful 32MP selfie shooter and triple 16MP + 2MP + 8MP cameras that come with AI capabilities. The main shooter is 16MP, 2MP acts as a depth sensor while the 8MP is wide-angle.
Hmm, AI? In the camera modes is where you’ll find this most useful especially AI CAM (which doubles as the default shooting mode) and AR shot that has snap-chat like filters for those that are into that sort of thing. Animoji like filters are also there but the most interesting part is the incorporation of Google Lens. this identifies objects by snapping them on the camera and offers you more details about them. It is like a QR code reader of sorts on steroids but for photo objects, not codes.
I mostly like shots from the selfie shooter. Photos from the back camera are fine especially in well-lit conditions but struggle a little bit in dim-lit conditions where results were mixed but not exactly a miss. For the price, I couldn’t complain anymore.
Battery
As with the camera, people care about how long their phones will last. The Phantom 9 comes with a 3,500 mAh battery. It mostly performed okay but couldn’t last more than a day as were the case with the Phantom 8.
And TECNO’s addition of a non-fast charger in the box was adding insult to injury. Not to say that the Phantom 9 doesn’t have fast charging capabilities however, it might require you to invest extra bucks for this.
TECNO added extra features aimed at mitigating battery drain using AI like smart power-saving as your phone gradually learns your usage patterns and adjusts battery usage accordingly, AI smart reminders and so many more as we are yet to see.
The other things
These are nice adds but not necessarily must-haves, though they added a little bit of flavor to the Phantom 9. These include the Battery lab that prompts the manual power saving by cleaning unnecessary power-consuming apps, Bike mode for rejection of any incoming and this exits after 2 hours. It also has other features like Auto SMS replies and finally Whatsapp Mode that limits background activity and only allows the active app/service to use it.
TECNO also included eye care to reduce eye strain plus read mode tho these do more or less the same thing.
The verdict
The Phantom 9 improves many areas of the Phantom 8 albeit at a reduced price point. It undercuts the latter and retails for only UGX 919,000. This undercutting doesn’t come as a surprise given the omissions with the Phantom9. Should you go ahead and buy it, I say you should go ahead and shortlist it given what it offers is competing with other flagships at a much smaller price.
