Tecno Camon 20 Premier review

Design

In our opinion, Tecno has succeeded in making the Camon 20 Premier a truly distinctive product. That camera island has such a particular shape that it's hard to confuse. It goes rather well with the surrounding geometrical pattern on the back of the device.

The back itself is made of some hard rubbery material, which has a fine vegan leather type of texture to it. The design elements, including the geometrical lines and writing on the back, are pretty deep grooves recessed into the surface.

You can have the Camon 20 Premier in either Dark Welkin color, which appears to simply be black in renders or the Serenity Blue, which is visible on our review unit. We are very much digging the look of the latter. It's a very subtle pastel kind of color that isn't overly flashy but is not boring either.

The Camon 20 Premier has color-coordinated bezels, which is a nice touch. The bluish tint on our unit is a good, even if broad, match to the back side of the phone. The surface of the frame is very glossy and a real fingerprint magnet. At least the phone's back side doesn't attract any dirt, so there's that.

Speaking of the middle frame, its shape is reminiscent of iPhone design. It has a sizeable flat area and tapers off gently on either side. That's about the only design element the Camon 20 Premier borrows from Apple, though, since it has a very distinctive look of its own overall.

The Camon 20 Premier looks pretty modern from the front as well. It has pretty thin display bezels with a screen-to-body ratio of 89.3%. Its bottom chin is particularly thin, while the top bezel is just slightly larger, but it houses an earpiece that doubles as a speaker and some sensors to the right, plus a dual LED selfie flash module.

The selfie camera punch hole is reasonably sized. It's not overly large.

The Tecno Camon 20 Premier is very comfortable to hold. It offers plenty of grip, and it is well-balanced. It's not top-heavy and feels nice and dense, with no noticeable hollowness to the back. At 202.5 grams, it is not particularly light, but then again, this is a 161.9 x 74.3 x 7.8 mm device with a 6.67-inch display and a 5,000 mAh battery. It doesn't exactly aspire to be compact.

Build quality

As already mentioned, the Camon 20 Premier feels sturdy and solid. There is no hollowness to the back side. In fact, it feels kind of dense, if that makes any sense.

In terms of materials, we already mentioned the sort of rubbery surface on the back. It doesn't gather dirt and doesn't seem prone to scratching, which we appreciate. We can only assume that underneath that surface is a plastic panel since most of the Camon 20 Premier is made of plastic.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with using plastic as a structural material, either. It is light and strong. Doesn't shatter quite like glass nor bend like metal. Plus, Tecno has done a good job with the glossy finish of the phone frame, which successfully imitates a metal look.

On a less positive note, the Camon 20 Premier lacks any formal ingress protection rating. Tecno also doesn't mention any particulars about the surface covering the phone's display. We can only hope that it is some type of undisclosed glass, but we would still advise you to keep the pre-installed plastic screen protector in place or get yourself a glass one instead.

Controls

The Camon 20 Premier has a pretty standard control layout. The right-hand side of the phone houses the power button and volume buttons. These are glossy, just like the surrounding frame.

We don't particularly like their vertical placement. The power button is a tad too low for our taste. And the buttons don't feel amazing in terms of tactile feedback. They are a bit on the "mushy" side, but nothing too dramatic worth more than just a passing mention.

The left side of the phone is bare as the entire plastic middle frame is uninterrupted.

The top side of the Camon 20 Premier isn't overly busy either. It has a hole for the secondary noise-canceling microphone. Also, a speaker grill, which is a nifty little addition. This way, the two speakers can fire sound sideways and, in theory, be a bit more balanced. Plus, this makes covering the speaker with your palm harder to do.

The phone's bottom side houses the other speaker behind a rather large grill. The main microphone is also here, and so is the SIM tray. It features two Nano-SIM slots and no expandable memory slot, which is a bit of a bummer. The Type-C port is also here.

The Camon 20 Premier uses an optical under-display fingerprint reader. It is both accurate and snappy. This technology has really matured in recent years, so we expect nothing short of it.

Other than that, the front of the phone houses the selfie camera in its reasonably-sized punch hole and a few front-facing sensors, which are tucked away in the top bezel to the right of the earpiece.

In case you were wondering, there is no notification LED on the Camon 20 Premier, even though Tecno managed to fit two front-facing LED camera flash modules in the top frame, grouped together to the right of the earpiece.

Connectivity

The Camon 20 Premier is a dual SIM device. It supports SA and NSA 5G connectivity on both SIM cards. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about the local connectivity with dual-band Wi-Fi ac and 5.2 with A2DP and LE support. Well, we are happy to see that there are both NFC and an FM radio on board, so there's that.

The USB Type-C port provides a USB 2.0 data connection. That means theoretical max transfer speeds of 480 Mbps. The Camon 20 Premier has USB Host or OTG functionality. Nothing fancy beyond that, though, like video output.

The Camon 20 Premier does have an almost full set of sensors on board. There is an icm42631 accelerometer and gyroscope combo, stk33562 light and hardware proximity combo and mmc5603 magnetometer and compass combo. There is no built-in barometer.