Tecno Camon 20 Premier review

HiOS 13 on top of Android 13

The Camon 20 Premier runs on Android 13 with HiOS 13 on top. Even though HiOS has gone through a major version number change this time, not a lot has changed in the UX.

Tecno has been running and refining its own skin for some time now, which we've generally found to be quite good in the past, with a few on-and-off caveats here and there. These mostly come down to pre-installed bloat and ads, but the experience on the Camon 20 Premier is actually pretty clean, as the bloat and the ads are noticeably reduced.

That's not to say there aren't many pre-installed apps and utilities. Tecno is still sticking to its traditions of developing and deploying its own set of apps to cover the basic features. You get an in-house gallery and video player and an app store, even two depending on how you count them. These can still get annoying at times, but we can understand the angle Tecno is coming from.

Hi Browser • AI Gallery • Phone Master • Phone Master • AHA Games • Palm Store

If some of the third-party apps are bothering you with various notifications, you can disable those from within the annoying app or the Notification settings.

Getting into the Camon 20 Premier is business as usual, with both fingerprint and face recognition available. You can also choose from a few animations for the under-display fingerprint reader.

Biometrics and security

The Camon 20 Premier has an always-on display function to go with its OLED display. The lockscreen has two shortcuts on the bottom - one for the camera and one for the flashlight. Tecno offers a cover display implementation for its lock screen if you want to see different images when you unlock the device.

Once you're past that, you arrive at a standard homescreen interface. The leftmost pane, called the Zero screen, holds cards with suggested news, weather and quotes widgets and an app usage widget. You can disable the Zero screen in the 'Desktop settings'.

There's an app drawer by default which you can access from the old-school A-Z orange icon at the bottom or with an upward swipe from the bottom.

Lockscreen • Homescreen • Zero screen • Folder view • App drawer • Task switcher

Themes are available as part of HiOS, and there is a dedicated Theme store for this purpose.

Hi Theme

Tecno has a long-standing selection of advanced features that generally get carried forward from older models. That includes the Game mode with all the settings, statistics and parental controls. There is also a Smart panel with slide-from-the-side shortcuts.

Special function menu • Game mode • Social Turbo • Smart Panel

Social Turbo toolset is rather interesting (a WhatsApp enhancer of sorts) - it can change your voice, enhance your face during video calls, record your WhatsApp calls, and allow you to read messages without marking them as Read.

MemFusion is Tecno's name for virtual RAM. The Camon 20 Premier has 8GB of physical RAM chips on board and can extend that up to 16GB with another 8GB of virtual memory. By default, MemFusion is set to 5GB.

MemFusion

Ella - Tecno's own assistant is onboard.

Ella personal assistance

There is also FM radio app, as the phone offers support. You will need to plug in Type-C headphones to serve as an antenna, as usual (there are bundled ones).

Performance and benchmarks

The Tecno Camon 20 Premier uses a Mediatek Dimensity 8050 chipset. It is a very new 6nm chip, announced back in May this year. So much so, in fact, that we currently only have three devices in our database running the chip. That being said, however, the Dimensity 8050 is not entirely new since it is very similar to the Dimensity 1200 and 1300. As such, we expect very similar performance from it.

The Dimensity 8050 has four fast Cortex-A78 cores and four efficient Cortex-A55 cores. The Cortex-A78 units are actually divided between 1 Super Core running at up to 3GHz, and three Performance Cores ticking at up to 2.6GHz. There is a Mali-G77 MC9 GPU inside the chip. It is paired with 8GB of physical RAM and 512GB of non-expandable storage.

Let's kick things off with some CPU testing and GeekBench. As expected, the new Dimensity 8050 performs quite comparably to the Dimensity 1200 and 1300. We can kind of add the original Google Tensor chip and the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 to that list as well. That gives us a pretty good ballpark estimate of the raw performance of the Dimensity 8050. It's not a chart-topper, but it definitely holds its own, particularly in its price range.

Geekbench 5

GeekBench 6

AnTuTu is a much more compound benchmark that takes into account things like memory and storage speeds and also features graphical tests. It is pretty favorable towards the Tecno Camon 20 Premier. Again, we are not looking at a chart-topper, but the Camon 20 Premier still manages to outpace some of its far more popular competitors like the Samsung Galaxy A54 and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 Pro.

AnTuTu 9

As already mentioned, the new Dimensity 8050 is pretty similar on a hardware level to the Dimensity 1200 and 1300. As expected, the rough performance figures posted by the Mali-G77 MC9 GPU are in the same ballpark. That's great to see, and it means that the GPU drivers are already mature and that Tecno is making proper use of the hardware at hand.

And once again, while the Camon 20 Premier isn't topping any graphical test charts either, it is also holding its own very well in this area. It is worth noting that Dimensity 8000 and 9000 series chips offer notably more potent GPU configurations than the Dimensity 8050. The same goes for the Google Tensor chips, both original and G2, also the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2.

GFXBench (onscreen)

GFXBench (offscreen)

Again, it is worth noting that the Camon 20 Premier has both the Samsung Galaxy A54 and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 Pro beat - two of its prominent competitors. The same goes for the Realme 11 Pro+, which is rocking the also new Dimensity 7050 chipset.

Finally, we have 3DMark, which generally tends to offer a more concise and cleaner visual representation of the relative graphical performance of devices through its consistent off-screen rendering tests. It offers no major surprises. As expected, the Camon 20 Premier still holds its ground well and performs in the Dimensity 1200 and 1300 ballpark. Once again, there are definitely more potent GPU devices out there in the same price range, but the Camon 20 Premier also has both the Galaxy A54 and Redmi Note 12 Pro handily beat in this department.

3DMark (offscreen 1440p)

The Dimensity 8058 inside the Camon 20 Premier seems to run relatively cool without too much thermal stress. The device itself definitely doesn't get too hot to the touch on the surface, just moderately so, which is a major plus. Tecno seemingly paid extra attention to cooling, equipping the phone with a large 5515 mm2 graphene sheet, 2224 mm2 vapor chamber and high thermal conductivity polymer gel.

The Camon 20 Premier has good thermal-throttling behavior with a nice and gradual decline in performance over time without major hiccups and drops. The phone does lose a substantial amount of performance over time, though, which is perhaps worth noting.

Thermal-throttling

Overall, the Tecno Camon 20 Premier is powerful enough to offer a perfectly smooth and fluent experience. It managed to chew through every task we threw at it with ease, even relatively heavy games. While it's not topping any charts, the Camon 20 Premier is definitely not starved for performance in any way.