Tecno Camon 30 Premier Review: Camera-focused smartphone that deserves your attention – Crypto News

But as history has taught us, megapixels and specifications don’t always translate into great real-world performance. I’ve spent the last several weeks extensively testing out the Tecno Camon 30 Premier to see how it fares in day-to-day usage and find if it is truly the next camera champion to watch out for in the premium mid-range segment.

Unboxing and design:

Inside the box, you get the Tecno Camon 30 Premier, some paperwork, a good quality plastic case, a Type A to Type C cable, a 70W adapter, a SIM ejector tool, some paperwork and a tempered glass. This is the best quality case I’ve ever seen coming with a smartphone, and the addition of a tempered glass only makes it a wholesome unboxing experience.

I received the Camon 30 Premier in Lava Black colour variant, which I really liked given the minimalistic vibe it portrays. There is also a Snowy Silver colour option which could be more appealing to a wide variety of users.

The Camon 30 Premier stands out from the competition with its unique vegan leather and aluminium back design. While there is a familiar watch-like large camera module, the presence of a vertical camera flash and a red-coloured ‘alert dot’ provides the phone with a more nuanced touch.

The frame of Camon 30 Premier is made out of aluminium and lends the phone a very premium finish. It comes with an IR blaster, a USB 2.0 port, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, in-display fingerprint scanner and an IP54 rating for dust and splash resistance, meaning it can handle some dust and rain drops but not full submersion under water.

Display and Performance:

The Camon 30 Premier comes with a 6.77 inch 1.5K LTPO AMOLED display with up to 120Hz refresh rate and 1400 nits of peak brightness. It is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5 and comes with wet finger touchscreen operation, which helps in improving usage while using the phone with damp fingers or when there’s a bit of water on it.

This is a flat panel with minimal bezels and a punch-hole style notch at the top. It delivers vibrant colours and deep contrasts, making the smartphone ideal for long streaming sessions. However, I did notice an usual issue where sometimes the brightness would change on its own despite the adaptive brightness button option turned off.

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The dual stereo speakers on the Camon 30 Premier are fairly loud and do not distort the sound even at full volume. In fact, I rarely needed to use my earphones or the external speaker during media-watching sessions on the Camon 30 Premier.

On the performance front, the Camon 30 Premier runs on the MediaTek Dimensity 8200 Ultimate processor, the same processor which we have previously seen on the Infinix GT 20 Pro (Review). While this isn’t a near-flagship chipset like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 on the OnePlus 12R (Review) or the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 on Poco F6 (Review), the phone can still can still hold its own for day-to-day tasks and even casual gaming sessions. Suffice it to say, this isn’t a gaming-centered smartphone, and it does have a tendency to get slightly warm during longer gaming sessions.

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As for the benchmarks, the Camon 30 Premier had a score of 9,43,722 on Antutu. On Geekbench 6, it had a single core score of 1,090 and a multi-core score of 3,560. Meanwhile, the smartphone received the best loop score of 1,737 with a stability score of 98.5% on 3D Mark’s Wild Life Extreme Stress Test.

Software and battery:

The Camon 30 Premier runs on the company’s proprietary HiOS 14 custom skin based on Android 14. Tecno has promised 2 years of Android updates and 3 years of security patches with this devices. The smartphone comes with very few pre-installed apps and there were no ads to report so far.

The software experience is one of the highlights of this device, thanks to new AI features and other neat functionalities added by Tecno. For instance, the in-built dialer app comes with a dedicated WhatsApp icon, allowing users to send direct messages on WhatsApp even without saving the other person’s phone number.

Another feature I noticed was the social assistant that pops up while making WhatsApp calls. With this menu, one can record a WhatsApp call, switch voices from a number of presets, fill light in your video, change video background, open dual camera and even add emoji while a video call is in progress. While almost all smartphone makers are rushing to add generative AI features to their devices, the implementation here by Tecno is pretty unique and I hope it does catch on.

The phone also comes with Ella GPT AI assistant pre-installed, which can used to replace Google Assistant as the default chatbot. However, Ella GPT isn’t on the level of new-age AI assistants yet; it seemed incapable of handling nuanced instructions and even continuing long conversations. So, if you really want to replace Google Assistant on your phone, I would rather recommend opting for Gemini or ChatGPT instead.

Moreover, I feel HiOS still requires some routine changes before I would be comfortable relying on it for day-to-day usage. Apart from the auto brightness issue that I previously mentioned, I also encountered some unexpected app closures and issues occasional issues with processing the notification text on Camon 30 Premier.

The smartphone comes with a 5,000 mAh battery with support for 70W fast charging. It takes around 50-60 minutes to take the Camon 30 Premier from 0 to 100 percent. While the battery performance here may not rival the OnePlus 12R or the iQOO Neo Pro, I still managed to go through the day with a single charge with a screen on time of around 6 – 6.5 hours.

Camera:

Cameras are the star of the show here with Tecno packing 4 50MP shooters on the Camon 30 Premier. This includes a 50MP Sony IMX890 sensor with OIS, a 50MP ultra-wide angle lens, a 50MP 3x periscope telephoto camera and a 50MP selfie shooter. The rear and front camera are both capable of shooting a maximum of 4K videos 60fps videos but a more stable output is only available for 1080p 30fps.

I like that the camera app on the Camon 30 Premier allows taking pictures in 3 different modes: Standard, Bright and Camon, which different slightly in the way image is processed. Moreover, there is a new option called AIGC portrait which uses AI to add the user’s face in a preset template. The results aren’t the most impressive yet, this does seem like a feature which could be carved out further in the future.

In daylight conditions, the 50MP primary camera captures detailed and sharp images with vibrant colors and excellent dynamic range. Even during low light conditions, the Camon 30 Premier manages to hold its own for the most part but it does have a tendency to overboost the colurs in some shots.

When switching to the ultra-wide angle lens, there is very minimal colour shift and almost no noticeable loss in detail, a feat very few smartphones in this price range can boast of. Meanwhile, the 50MP telephoto lens also takes decent shots, capturing images with close to natural skin colours. While Tecno allows for up to 60x digital zoom, I don’t believe images beyond 10x zoom will be of much use.

The selfie camera also does a pretty decent job, producing clear images with closer to natural face colours. As usual, in order to help the readers make their own mind, I have attached a Google Drive link here with all the raw images from the Camon 30 Premier.

Verdict: Should you buy the Tecno Camon 30 Premier?

The Tecno Camon 30 Premier has a lot of things going for it, a unique back design,6.77-inch LTPO AMOLED display, 50MP quad camera setup, interesting AI features and good battery performance. However, the presence of Dimensity 8200 Ultimate chipset makes it amongst the lesser powerful smartphones around the ₹40,000 smartphone bracket. The lack of UFS 4.0 storage and just an IP52 rating (compared to IP64 or IP68 rating on its competitors), also doesn’t help its case.

So should you buy the Camon 30 Premier at a price of ₹39,999? Well, it depends. While the performance enthusiasts are likely to drift towards more powerful options like Oneplus 12R, iQOO Neo 9 Pro and Realme GT 6. More camera-focused users may find it hard to look past the Camon 30 Premier.

In conclusion, while the Tecno Camon 30 Premier may not go on to dethrone the iPhone 15 or the Galaxy S24 anytime soon, it is still a very compelling device, especially in a segment dominated by performance-centered smartphones.

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Published: 09 Jul 2024, 04:13 AM IST