Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G Review in Hindi: A little different in design!

Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G is a new player in the sub-Rs 30,000 smartphone segment. This has been the most active segment in India at the moment. In recent months, many great phones have appeared in the sub-Rs 30,000 segment, such as Motorola Edge 40, Poco F5 5G, Nothing Phone 1, which also proved to be true in our test. Now, it’s the turn of Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G, which is the most premium model in its series. From design to specs sheet, every effort has been made to make the smartphone an all-in-one package to please customers of all classes. So let’s know in this review how well the smartphone proves itself in a price of less than Rs 30,000.

Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G: Price in India

The Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G has been launched in just one variant – 8GB RAM and 512GB storage, priced at Rs 29,999. It is offered in Dark Welkin (Black) and Serenity Blue colour options, of which we had the latter variant for review.

Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G: Design & Display

In terms of design, the Camon 20 Premier can attract many people at first glance. It breaks the trend and includes a unique camera island that comes with a gloss black finish. Equipped with two large camera rings and a smaller ring surrounded by LEDs, this island is placed on a back panel made of hard rubberized material with a texture similar to vegan leather. The pastel blue color gives a very good look. A geometric pattern has been created on the panel with stripes. Although looks are a personal choice, I found the design of the Camon 20 Premier unique and attractive.

Not just the look, Tecno has given it a boxy design to improve the overall feel, with the flat display and frame, the phone was easy to grip and the textured panel also made it non-slip. At the same time, the rubber-like material does not catch fingerprints. The frame is made of polycarbonate, which includes volume rockers and power and lock/unlock buttons on the right side. There is a speaker grill, SIM tray and primary microphone along with Type-C port at the bottom and a secondary speaker and microphone for stereo output and noise cancellation respectively at the top. The volume and power buttons were easy to reach during one-handed use. The phone is definitely heavy at 202.5 grams, but the phone did not feel too heavy in everyday use. Here Tecno has done a good job of distributing the weight.

The Camon 20 Premier has a 6.67-inch FHD+ (2400 x 1080 pixels) AMOLED display, which supports refresh rate up to 120Hz. There are thin and almost uniform bezels around the display, which works to improve the content viewing experience. The display was quite bright indoors, but outdoors, there was sometimes difficulty in reading text when direct sunlight fell on the display. However, it produces very sharp and vivid colors. The phone comes with HDR10+ playback certification, but during the review I found that videos on the YouTube app streamed with HDR, but the Netflix app was not detecting it. The phone has stereo speakers, but they were slightly less loud than I expected. However, they will not spoil the fun of watching movies in a small room.

The fingerprint sensor is placed below the display, which was fast and accurate. However, it is fitted quite low, which makes it a bit inconvenient to reach it while using the phone with one hand at times. The display supports refresh rate up to 120Hz. Tecno has kept a total of four options here, in which the refresh rate can be set to 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz and Auto-Switch. In auto-switch, the refresh rate keeps changing automatically according to the content running on the screen. The display performance was quite smooth during my use. In auto-switch mode, the refresh rate was switching between 60 to 120Hz.

Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G: Specifications and Software

Tecno has powered the Camon 20 Premier with an octa-core MediaTek Dimensity 8050 SoC, paired with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. My unit at the time of review was running HiOS 13 based on Android 13 and had Android security update version July 2023, which was old as of September. I had not received the latest security update at the time of writing the review.

With Android 13, Tecno has improved the software experience of HiOS a lot. However, you still get a lot of bloatware on first boot. Most of these apps can be uninstalled and some can be disabled. The good thing was that during my usage, I only got one or two notifications from the native apps throughout the day.

The software has a lot of customization options. I personally liked some of its features, one of which was the option to blur a minimized app in the recent apps screen. Apart from this, the smart panel that pops up from the side of the screen is also a nice add-on, which gives you shortcuts to important features and apps and the apps opened from here open in a small multi-window. Peek Proof shows only the part that you select and blacks out the rest.

The phone includes features like NFC, wired FM, AI Subtitle (which generates live subtitles during calls or streaming), and PC Connection for easy PC connection.

Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G: Performance and Battery life

The Camon 20 Premier gets the Dimensity 8050 SoC, which was launched in May this year. The Camon 20 Premier was the first phone to come with this chipset. The new chipset is built on a 6nm process and is a capable chipset for daily tasks as well as running graphics demanding games. Be it switching between apps or everyday tasks like scrolling on social media, this chipset handled everything with ease. Even graphics demanding games ran very smoothly at default settings. BGMI also ran smoothly at ‘Ultra’ framerate and ‘HDR’ graphics without lag and frame drops. At the same time, there was no problem in playing titles like Asphalt 9 and Call of Duty: Mobile.

The phone scored 7,25,792 in AnTuTu and 1118 and 3322 points in Geekbench single and multi-core tests respectively. On the other hand, the phone scored 120 Fps, 75 Fps, 40 Fps respectively in GFXBench’s T-Rex, Manhattan 3.1 and Car Chase tests. All these scores were slightly lower than other competitors in the price range. But still, I had no complaints with the performance of this phone in everyday tasks.

The battery life of Camon 20 Premier was quite good. This smartphone with 5,000mAh battery gave a day’s backup very comfortably even after one to one and a half hours of gaming, a few hours of calling and the rest of the time using social media apps. If you use less social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, then the battery of this phone can also last for one and a half days. In our HD video loop test, the phone lasted for 18 hours and 25 minutes, which was a good backup.

The smartphone supports 45W fast charging and the good thing is that it also comes with a 45W charging adapter in the box. With the help of this charger, the Camon 20 Premier got charged from 0-40 percent in 30 minutes and fully charged in 1 hour 20 minutes.

Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G: Cameras

The camera setup of the Camon 20 Premier 5G will look no less than a flagship smartphone on the pages. The smartphone comes with a triple camera unit, which has a 50-megapixel primary sensor with sensor-shift stabilization. Let me remind you that sensor shift technology was so far available only on iPhones in India. Not only this, another USP of the camera unit here is the 108-megapixel ultra-wide angle camera. The third camera is a 2-megapixel depth sensor and a 32-megapixel sensor with dual LED flash hidden under the bezel on the front.

Starting with the camera app, here Tecno has made a lot of improvements to the camera app with HiOS 13. The app is quite simple and very easy to navigate. I also did not feel any delay or lag in the processing of shots. It also gets some special modes, like Sky Shop, which lets you change the sky in the scene in real-time, as well as an AR Short, which turns you into an avatar. Apart from this, there is also a Pro mode and dual video mode.

I usually start with the primary camera, but here I’m starting with the Camon 20 Premier’s special 108MP sensor first. The sensor performs well in daylight, with colours coming out and photos showing good contrast levels. There was no lack of sharpness in the images either, and dynamic range worked well in all shots. However, colours and contrast looked washed out at the edges in almost all shots. There is also a 108MP mode in the app, which gives you images at full resolution without pixel binning, and it worked exactly as I expected. Photos in this mode had plenty of detail and there was no lack of colour, contrast, and sharpness. I must say that the Camon 20 Premier’s wide-angle sensor performed much better than its primary sensor.

Talking about its 50-megapixel primary camera, it did not disappoint me in daylight either, but the results were not consistent across photos. Some shots were perfect for uploading directly to social media, but some shots taken on the spot lacked details and exposure accuracy. Apart from this, the red color in many shots became oversaturated after processing. However, the camera kept other colors natural. Shots taken with the main camera did not lack details and sharpness and the dynamic range in the photos was also good.

At the same time, camera performance also started to decline as the light decreased. In low light, the primary and ultra-wide angle cameras take good pictures, but here I saw a huge drop in details. Due to sensor shift OIS, the night mode works well and the ‘Super Night Mode’ in the app does a great job of improving shots. However, here too the performance was not consistent and in some shots the pictures were overexposed and sharpening was also excessive.

There are many smartphones in this price range that offer excellent rear camera performance, but their selfie camera performance is a bit disappointing. However, the Camon 20 Premier can capture some of the best selfies in its segment. The skin tones were natural in each of the shots I took in daylight and the overall selfie had good colors as well as sharpness and dynamic range. At the same time, the results were also good in portrait mode, the camera recognizes the edges of the subject well and the bokeh effect also came out quite natural. At the same time, the lack of sharpness starts to appear in the pictures in low light. The Camon 20 Premier has a dual flash, which works to add extra exposure to the pictures in low light.

The rear primary camera of the Camon 20 Premier 5G can shoot up to 4K videos at 30fps. Activating sensor-shift OIS sets the resolution to 1080p, which is a bit strange, as I expected this feature to be used at 4K. Yet even without sensor shift, the primary camera recorded fairly stable videos.

Tecno Camon 20 Premier 5G: Verdict

Based on the specifications available at its price, the Tecno Camon 20 Premier comes very close to being an all-rounder. The smartphone comes with a unique and attractive design that breaks away from the trend. The camera setup equipped with sensor shift OIS can give you good shots. Also, the long battery life along with stereo speakers and bright display make it a good multimedia device.

If you want an attractive design and good camera performance under Rs 30,000, you can go with the Camon 20 Premier. If performance and smooth software experience are your top priority, you can also consider the Motorola Edge 40 and Nothing Phone 1.