Here’s a feature-packed mid-range camera phone you may not have heard of, the Tecno Camon 30 Premier. What sorts of features are we talking about, let’s find out in our Tecno Camon 30 Premiere review.
Design and Build
The Tecno Camon 30 Premiere isn’t a flagship, but it does offer some high-end features that garner some attention. These include a high-res LTPO OLED display and a potent camera setup, which includes a periscope telephoto cam and an ultra-wide with autofocus. The design is premium as well, especially for a mid-ranger. There’s a large round camera bump which you normally see on flagship camera phones. The back panel is made of soft vegan leather and there’s a portion of the back made of aluminum too, which is an interesting accent. The frame is aluminum as well. Ingress protection here is rated at IP54 against some dust and splashes of water.
Display
The display of the phone is a 6.77-inch LTPO OLED panel with high-resolution Gorilla Glass 5 protection and a 120Hz refresh rate. This display looks good. At 451ppi, the panel is sharp and we also like the rather thin bezels all around and there’s support for HDR video here. Thanks to the LTPO tech, the display can dial its refresh rate quite low in order to save energy. We observed it going from a smooth 120Hz while swiping around to 10Hz while idling. When it comes to brightness though, the Camon 30 Premier falls behind some competitors. We measured around 580 nits maximum with the manual slider, which boosted to around 700 nits in auto mode when exposed to bright light. It’s not too bad, but these days many phones can go north of 1000 nits.
Audio and Biometrics
The Tecno Camon 30 Premier has a pair of stereo speakers with excellent loudness. It’s among the loudest phones we’ve tested. At high volume levels though you do get distortion. At normal volume the sound quality is decent with okay bass. For biometric input, there’s an under-display fingerprint reader. It’s accurate and responsive but we feel it’s placed a bit too close to the bottom edge.
Storage and Interface
The phone has a single storage option, 512 gigs on board, which is great. There is no microSD slot, though. The interface of the phone is Tecno’s HiOS 14, running on top of Android 14. It’s pretty straightforward and runs smoothly. One special feature is Dynamic Port. It’s Tecno’s own version of Apple’s Dynamic Island. The bar across the top gives contextual info, as well as shortcuts to interact with certain system apps. There’s also an IR blaster on this phone, so you can use it to control other devices. TECNO hasn’t come out and said how much software support they’ll provide for the Camon 30 Premier. Hopefully, it’ll be for a decent amount of time.
Performance
Now we’ll talk about the chipset. It’s a Mediatek Dimensity 8200 Ultimate. Specs-wise, it’s the same as the Dimensity 8200. We’re not sure what’s different with the ultimate version. In benchmarks, the Tecno Camon 30 Premier does a nice job. It’s competitive against other mid-rangers in the class, and when it comes to CPU performance, it can even hold up against budget flagships like the Nothing Phone 2 and the Galaxy S23 FE. There’s enough power here for smooth everyday performance and even some gaming. The thermal management is decent here too. During our prolonged stress test, the phone maintained a solid level of performance.
Battery and Charging
The Camon 30 Premier packs a 5,000 mAh battery, and the battery life is competitive, with a good overall active use score of 13 hours and 29 minutes. You also get support for 70-watt charging, and the adapter is included in the box. With it, we were able to charge the phone from zero to 77% in half an hour and a full charge took 44 minutes.
Camera
Finally, we have the cameras which are powerful for the class. On the back, there’s a 50-megapixel main cam with a relatively large sensor, a 50-megapixel periscope telephoto cam, and a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera which has autofocus. On the front there’s a 50-megapixel selfie cam with autofocus and eye tracking and all cameras can record 4k video.
Conclusion
So that’s the Tecno Camon 30 Premier. It may not be making headlines like some other mid-rangers out there, but when it comes to features, it over-delivers. You get the premium design, an LTPO OLED display, loudspeakers, a solid chipset, and good battery life and charging speed. Not to mention the camera quality is exceptional for the class. There are a couple of nitpicks. The display isn’t the brightest around, and the future software support is left up in the air.