Tecno Camon 17 Pro review

Design

The Camon 17 Pro is keen to advertise its branding - a sizeable Camon logo in the lower-left corner on the back together with a smaller Tecno badge leave no doubts about the phone's heritage. That's a notable change coming from the previous generation where Techno was bigger than Camon - the family's focus on camera now gets center stage.

We'd say it's at least a little bit too much - the size of the badge, the aperture mechanism in the 'O', the notches in the 'C' and 'A' - it's like Tecno didn't know when to stop designing. That's in addition to the vertical stripe pattern of the matte back panel and its playfulness with light that makes it change hues depending on the angle. Taking a step back, however, even though it may all sound excessive, the phone somehow manages to pull off the look.

 

The top left corner is home to the camera island, and it's one of those two-level designs with the cameras sticking out higher up than the beach with the quad (!) LED flash. There's nothing more than a '64MP AI quad cam' inscription here - misleading in the number of actual useful modules, as are many low-end to midrange handsets.

As best as we can tell, the back panel is plastic. Tecno isn't making any Gorilla Glass claims, be it for the rear or the display side.

The 6.8-inch LCD is surrounded by what we can most easily describe as midrange bezels - it's got a black frame all around that won't go unnoticed but doesn't strike us as anachronistically thick either. The top bezel is barely thicker than the sides, if at all, and the chin is a bit meatier, but not by a lot.

The earpiece above the display also doubles as an extra speaker in a stereo setup (sortof). The punch hole for the selfie camera is a bit larger than what we like seeing, though you could argue its diameter is on par with other non-flagship efforts.

The frame of the Camon 17 Pro is plastic, this one we're certain of. The right side is home to the physical controls. A power button with a fingerprint embedded in it is placed just above the midpoint, in an indented portion of the frame, while two discrete volume buttons with a concentric ring texture are right above it.

The fingerprint reader is always on by default, so a tap will suffice, but you could change its behavior in settings to require a press, if you happen to be activating it inadvertently as is often the case with these side-mounted units. As for when you do intend to unlock the phone, the reader works really well, for both right thumbs and left index fingers.

The card slot is on the opposite side of the Camon 17 Pro, high up near the top end. It's a triple slot to accommodate a couple of nano SIMs and a microSD card all at the same time - if the 256GB of built-in memory are somehow insufficient.

Down on the bottom of the phone, you'll find the USB-C port flanked by the main loudspeaker on one side and the 3.5mm headphone jack and the primary mic on the other.

Up top, a lone pinhole suggests there's another mic for stereo sound capture and noise-canceling in calls.

Triple card slot • IO on the bottom • Mic up top

The Camon 17 Pro measures 168.9x77x9mm and weighs in at 201g - on our scales at least, since Tecno hasn't provided an exact number. The phone is a good centimeter taller than the Galaxy A32 and some 5mm more than the Redmi Note 10 Pro, and it's also the widest of the three, as well as the heaviest, if not by all that much. So if you're looking for a more compact phone in this segment, the Camon is not it.