After a year of hiatus, I am finally back in gadget review- and today we are reviewing Tecno's Camon 16 Premier. Tecno, Africa's one of the top smartphone brand, has been pacing its operation in Bangladesh. They have opened a production plant here and this device is manufactured (assembled would be the right word). Let's see what this device is like:

Starting with the form factor, the device, keeping with the trend, is ginormous. The main real estate of the device is a 6.9 FHD dot-in display LCD Panel which provides near accurate colour gamut. Out of the phone comes with a 90Hz refresh rate which is feel good. You can certainly toggle it down to 60Hz which we highly discourage. The smoothness, as well as the responsiveness, while dropping a bit however the battery life of the phone will increase by up to 10 per cent. The brightness of the screen can also go up quite high so we recommend to use auto adjustments.  The touch is responsive and one of the best part of the phone to me is the touch sensor on the side which doubles as the power button. The touch sensor is quite big, and the response time is almost instantaneous. One small caveat of the phone is that it does not have any LED notification indicator.

The build of the phone is solid. The glass front and polished back of the phone will certainly give you a plush feeling while holding it. The logo on the back is etched stylishly on a glacial silver colour panel- things can't get any chicer than that.

The top right of the screen houses the 48MP+ 8MP dual flash camera. This dual camera of the phone does what it is supposed to do: pick good photos. The photos are not as sharp or natural one might expect, but certainly Instagram-worthy. The while balance is a bit off on the camera when taking photos using the AI mode. The wide-angle lens allowed me to take a bigger photo so group-selfies with this phone won't be a problem.

The main camera on the back is big, raised a chunk of sensor-housing has four individual camera sensor and on penta-flash. The quad cameras are 64MP wide camera, 8MP ultra-wide sensor, 2MP depth sensor and 2 MP dedicated video sensor. 

The photo quality of the phone can be rated as above average. It performs stellar in daylight. The AI mode can be a buzzkill if you like taking photos with accurate colour as the AI engine of the phone always tried to make the colour on every photo pop a bit. I haven't used the Camon 16 Pro, the elder sibling of the product line before, but online reviewers attested that photo quality has improved a lot on this iteration.

The performance of the phone is quite impressive too. Average day to day task including multitasking glides through the phone thanks the Octacore Mediatek G90T chipset coupled with 8GB RAM. I tried playing PUBG on the phone for nearly an hour and the performance remained buttery-smooth. The Mali-G76 MC4 GPU unit was able to handle some other graphics-intensive games on medium settings without dropping performance much. Only one issue we encountered during heavy gaming was the phone heating up a bit- which I guess is kind of expected.

Despite having a humongous screen, the phone actually had quite good battery life. It survived my everyday abuse from 10 AM in the morning till midnight without any mid-day charging. The 5,000 mAh did not take much time to charge up either- the credit here goes to the 33W fast charging port.

Lastly, the OS- man, really don't know where to begin or where to stop. HiOS 6 is probably one of the biggest let-downs of the phone. It might be partly due to the fact that I have been using Samsung and iPhones for a while now. The OS has colourful icons, bloatware, native advertising and app suggestions. To be honest, it isn't bad. Many people particularly youths find it appealing but it was not going with my taste.

Tecno has been excelling in the local market for a while now and Camon 16 Premier is certainly a device it can bet on to keep on continuing that very trend. The price-tag seemed a bit particularly with competition lurking around with so many options. But if you are in the market for a phone with a budget under 30k, then Camon 16 Premier is definitely worth considering.