TECNO’s flagship lineup, the Phantom, has had a great run until recently. Almost two years ago, the Phantom 8 was announced to an underwhelming receipt, maybe because its precursor, the Phantom 6 was an amazing phone that the 8 did not really build up from.

Now, the next Phantom, which was announced a while back has officially started selling in Kenya. The TECNO Phantom 9 comes at a time when competition in the mid-range smartphone segment has increased due to the entrant of serious players in the name of Samsung and Huawei.

First, let’s get the pricing out of the way. At Kes.24,999, the TECNO Phantom 9 is in direct competition with the Huawei Y9 Prime (2019), Huawei P30 Lite and the Samsung Galaxy A50, just to name a few of the current hottest phones.

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So, what does the Phantom 9 bring to the table to convince you to pick it over the rest? Well…

The Phantom 9 has an AMOLED display

The TECNO Phantom 9 features a 6.4″ Full HD AMOLED display that outputs popping colours and deep blacks. The advantages of AMOLED displays are all here, including battery saving capabilities if you use a dark theme across all your apps.

The phone also has a smaller waterdrop notch that houses the selfie camera and the bezels around the device have been significantly reduced to match 2019 trends.

An In-display fingerprint scanner

Still related to the display, TECNO has incorporated the fingerprint scanner into the display. The scanner, found at the bottom centre, is an optical scanner that lights up part of the screen to scan your finger.

It works pretty much like your traditional scanner only way more cooler and of course a tad slower as we’ve seen with every other phone that has a similar implementation.

Gradient Colours

Like almost every other smartphone from 2019, the TECNO Phantom 9 has not been left behind when it comes to playing with colours. The device’s back has been splashed with a mixture of blue and purple to produce hues that are very reminiscent of the aurora sky.

Admittedly, it looks beautiful and it’ll tempt you to walk around with the device without a cover but don’t because that beautiful back is also a massive fingerprint and hairline scratches magnet.

Triple Camera

The Phantom 9 boasts of an AI Triple lens setup that features a 16MP standard camera, a 2MP wide-angle lens and an 8MP 2x zoom lens. This, TECNO says, produce “clearer, wider angle pictures” with the ability to capture up to 120-degrees wide photos and extremely close-up shots of up to 2.5cm from the subject.

The AI in the camera will help with scene recognition and optimization, which will ensure that the camera presets the right settings for the object you are capturing, be it food, people, buildings or even sports activities.

TECNO Phantom 9 specifications

For those who fancy numbers, you’ll be happy to know that the Phantom 9 comes with 128GB internal storage as standard and 6GB of RAM to keep the software and all your tasks running smoothly.

The device is also equipped with Bluetooth 5.0, which means you can connect to two Bluetooth devices at the same time and also, it is capable of Safaricom VoLTE which recently launched.

Here’s a list of specifications of the TECNO Phantom 9:

TECNO Phantom 9 Specifications

Availability

The TECNO Phantom 9 has a  price tag of Kes.24,999, as earlier mentioned. The device is available at all TECNO branded retail shops, Safaricom shops and JUMIA.

There’s also the option of buying in instalments using Lipa Later, which now offers a trade-in program for all TECNO users with the Phantom 8 and monthly instalments starting at Kes.2,730.