Tecno Camon iTwin first impressions: Another phone with unimaginative design, features

Tecno Camon iTwin launched in India on Monday with a price tag of ₹11,499. On the specs sheet, it aims to match the likes of Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 and other top budget phones. Check out our first impression of Tecno Camon iTwin.

Tecno Camon iTwin is priced at ₹11,499 in India. (HT Photo)

Tecno Mobile is back with a new device for India's highly crowded budget smartphone market. The company's latest offering is Camon iTwin — a ₹11,499 smartphone that will be competing with the likes of Xiaomi Redmi Note 5, Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1.

Tecno Camon iTwin (name of the phones these days!) borrows a few elements from some popular phones. For instance, the overall look and feel is quite similar to a range of budget Android phones out there. Not that the design of the phone is bad or feels cheap, it's just very uninspiring. Over the last few months, phones like Honor 9 Lite and Oppo Realme1 have shown that the budget phones can have good looks, and received positive response.

In sheer terms of looks, Camon iTwin feels like just another smartphone. The dual-rear camera module on the back panel is quite similar to Apple's iPhone 8 Plus. Well, a lot of phones have been inspired by Apple's iPhones over the years. The back panel houses a fingerprint sensor on the top centre while the camera module on the top left corner is accompanied by an LED flash. The matte finish on the back makes the phone look quite subtle.

On the front, the phone has the selfie camera, speakers and LED flash on the top. The bottom edge houses the USB slot and speaker grilles. The volume and power buttons are on the right edge while the non-hybrid SIM slot (slots for two SIMs and microSD) is on the left edge.

Tecno Camon iTwin features a 6-inch HD+ Full View display. (HT Photo)

Tecno Camon iTwin features a 6-inch HD+ Full View display. (HT Photo)

Despite a larger 6-inch display, the phone feels pretty comfortable for use. Buttons like volume and fingerprint sensor are well within the reach. The phone feels pretty light to carry around.

Tecno Camon iTwin comes with a 6-inch HD+ IPS FullView screen with 18:9 aspect ratio, 87.48% screen to body percentage, 2.5D curved Glass, 500 nits brightness, and 85% NTSC colour gamut. During our brief usage, we had no qualms with the display quality.

The highlight of the phone is the dual-rear camera setup featuring 13-megapixel wide-angel sensor and 2-megapixel senor, LED flash and 5P lens. There are a bunch of camera features like Portrait Mode, 4X Digital Zoom, AI Beauty, AI ASD (auto scene detection), AI Bokeh, panorama mode, video chat with adjustable flash light; and low light night shot algorithm. We will give our final take on the camera quality once we've run the phone through a barrage of tests. But we did spend some time with its 13-megapixel sensor on the front. And during our brief usage, we found the camera to be very ordinary. There's a bokeh mode but that's very low quality.

The phone fails to detect edges properly and the results are an algorithm disaster. It takes a lot of time to process a bokeh image. Without any mode, the camera works just fine. Users can customise the depth of a portrait shot after capturing the photo, but the quality and user experience are inferior.

On the software side, Tecno Camon iTwin runs on HiOS based on Android 8.0 Oreo. Unlike various other budget phones in the market, the Tecno phone doesn't have a lot of bloatware, but it doesn't mean the UI is slick. It's relatively sluggish. There are a bunch of software features like gesture controls to quick fire an application and a dedicated WhatsApp mode that shuts down all the apps in the background only to channelise the resources for the instant messaging application.

Tecno Camon iTwin is powered by Qualcomm's entry-level 425 processor along with 3GB RAM. The chipset is available on a bunch of entry-level and budget Android phones. The same chipset powers the Xiaomi Redmi 5A, so we're hopeful the phone doesn't disappoint on the performance parameters.

Cut to the chase, Tecno Camon iTwin is just another Android phone with barely anything new for consumers. Based on our brief impressions, it's most probably an alternative to Xiaomi Redmi Note 5. Stay tuned for our detailed review where we dive deeper into the performance, battery life and rear camera capabilities.