By now you know the TECNO Camon series is the “ultimate” camera phone lineup for the budget smartphone maker and the Camon 15 Premier is no different. Unlike its lower-priced sibling, the Camon 15, the Premier variant aims to offer a premium experience.

The TECNO Camon 15 Premier retails for KES 26,999. For that price, there’s quite a number of smartphones you can pick up. In this review, we will highlight the good things about the Camon 15 premier, the things that suck and then you can proceed to make a decision whether or not the phone is worth the price.

But first, the specifications:

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• Display: 6.55″ 1080p
• Cameras: Quad 64MP + 5MP + 2MP + QVGA depth sensor and a 32MP selfie camera
• Processor: MediaTek Helio P35
• Software: Android 10
• Battery: 4000mAh
• Memory: 6GB RAM + 126GB storage

 What We Liked

Full-Display

From the onset, you will realize that the TECNO Camon 15 Premier has some good looks. Setting your eyes on the phone makes you feel like you just locked eyes with a good-looking human and they smiled back at you, especially in this Opal white colour.

The display covers nearly the whole front without any distractions – no notch and no thick bezels. That means that we have a pop-up selfie camera that may or may not turn you off from this device.

In my case, I appreciate the full-display and if that means putting up with moving parts on my phone then so be it. But if you’re worried, the phone does come with sensors on the pop-up camera that “hide” it when it detects it’s falling, just in case you drop it while trying to capture some selfies.

The brightness and accuracy of the display get an “okay” from us. It was reasonably bright under the sun and dim enough under the blankets. We couldn’t find any significant issues to point out in regards to this display.

Battery Life

Even with that big display that requires a lot of power to keep it on, the Camon 15 Premier did get me through the day. Notably, I am using my phone more now that I am at home, almost clocking 10 hours of screen on time.

If you are a heavy user like myself, starting your day off at 7 am will mean that by 11 pm you will be hitting the below 15% battery mark. This, to me, is good enough and charging up the phone doesn’t take that long either, around 90 minutes to get it to 100% thanks to fast charging capabilities.

Those who barely use their phones through the day will achieve one and a half days or maybe two days with the phone if you push it below 10% battery.

Cameras

The icing on this cake is the camera, it’s called Camon, come on. Let’s start with the back cameras, four of them, each with its own unique function and some working better than others.

For most users, they will take photos under the AI mode and they will get Instagram-worthy shots as long as the light is right (the Kikuyu me almost messed that up in writing). Take away some light and you are gonna be questioning what the camera is up to.

There are various shooting modes as well, such as beauty mode, Bokeh, Super night, AR shot (adds 3D filters on your face)  and Panorama.

The selfie camera, on the other hand, rises to the occasion whenever it gets summoned. Also with a similarly long list of shooting modes but again, most people will just use the standard AI mode. The selfie camera does a good job, honestly, it made the girls happier than it did me. There’s still some aspect of beautification and overexposure, even when you try to tinker with the settings.

Anyway, here are sample photos shot on the TECNO Camon 15 Premier:

What We Didn’t Like

2019 Called, They Want Their Design Back

If you’re gonna launch a phone in 2020, at least let it look like it’s from 2020. The design that we earlier praised is also sort of a let down here. We saw this implementation of a Pop-Up camera dominated 2019 and in 2020 we have moved on to the punchole camera.

Interestingly, the cheaper devices in the Camon 15 series come with this punchole implementation and honestly, they do look better.

Microphone and Loud Speaker

This was unprecedented and most times you wouldn’t know whether your phone’s microphone is terrible. With the Camon 15 Premier, I got a lot of complaints from people during calls that they were struggling to hear me, which meant I had to raise my voice just to counter the issue.

When it comes to the loudspeaker, things weren’t good either. When playing music, its loud, loud enough to hear across a room but when it comes to using the loudspeaker during calls, things just fall apart.

It’s possible that this is just a software issue as it only happens during calls but it’s important that you know about it.

Recommendation

You notice we didn’t talk about the performance of the phone and that’s because it was just meh. There were no lags but the phone would forget that you had opened and app pretty fast and this meant that you had to wait for microseconds for it to reload each time – but that’s not a big deal.

Anyway, for 27K should you outrightly buy this phone, consider it or just avoid it? After our usage and careful analysis, if you’re in the market for a phone at this price point, you should definitely CONSIDER the TECNO Camon 15 Premier.