Tecno Mobile is a part of Transsion Holdings – the company which also markets smartphones under the Infinix brand name. Phantom is a product line that focuses on premium devices and the latest to be launched under that brand name is the Phantom 8 smartphone.
In terms of design and build quality, the Phantom 8 is years ahead, when compared with its earlier iteration, the Phantom 6. For some reason, the company has skipped one number in the sequence of product launches.
One of the stand out features of the Phantom 8 is the front facing camera that offers a resolution of 20 megapixels. The front camera is coupled with a smart dual selfie flash, for perfect selfies.
Phantom 8’s diamond style design comes with a 3D Lighting, unibody metal edge and a 2.5D Drip Screen-curved battery cover. Along with the Phantom 8, you get a bunch of accessories included inside the box.
You get a pair of earbuds, USB-C charging cable and power adapter. You also get some paperwork such as the quick start guide and warranty info. Tecno also includes a one month subscription to music service Boomplay Music.
You also get a SIM tool, a clear case, and a screen protector. The phone is powered by a MediaTek Helio P25 processor and runs on Android Nougat OS. The company has promised that the Phantom 8 will get the Android Oreo update, though no date has been specified.
At the rear of the device, you get a dual camera system. The dual camera module includes one 12MP sensor and one 13MP sensor. The battery on the Phantom 8 is rated at 3500mAh. Rounding off the specs of the device are 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage space. The storage space can be expanded to up to 2TB (!!) using a TF card.
We ran a couple of benchmarks on the Phantom 8 to gauge its performance – namely, AnTuTu and Geekbench. The MediaTek Helio P25 is an upper mainstream ARM SoC and hence we got better performances than mid-range devices. On AnTuTu we scored 71200 points, which is pretty good in terms of performance.
We saw similar performance on Geekbench 4.0. On the 64-bit Single-Core tests, we clocked 967 points, while on 64-bit Multi-Core tests, we ended up with 3701 points. The phone did not suffer an lags when browsing through multiple open app windows.
The front camera of the Phantom 8 captures decent selfies. The rear dual camera setup though was pretty good at shooting images and videos. Under good lighting conditions, we ended up with very good photos. However, noise started creeping in, under lowlight conditions.
The Phantom 8 is a very good smartphone – however, the price tag of AED 1399 seems a bit expensive. I say this, because there are plenty of good sub-AED 1000 phones available on the market that offer similar performance and camera functionality. If you are on the market shopping for a second phone, you should consider the Phantom 8.
Price: AED 1399
