Tecno Camon 30 Premier review

6.77-inch LTPO OLED panel

The Tecno Camon 30 Premier punches above its weight class with its display. The handset uses a generous 6.77-inch LTPO OLED panel with 1264 x 2780px resolution. This is a higher-than-average resolution for the price range and a rare LTPO panel, allowing granular refresh rate control. And we also liked the rather thin bezels all around. They give the phone a more modern look and feel.

The screen supports HDR and support for Widevine L1, which allows you to stream high-quality videos on platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

When it comes to real-world performance, however, the display disappoints a bit. In manual mode, the screen can go up to 579 nits, while in auto mode, with high-brightness mode turned on, the OLED peaked at 854 nits. Tecno advertises 1,400 nits in HBM, so we may be dealing with a faulty unit or a widespread display issue. It's not the first time we've seen brightness issues with Tecno's smartphones, so everything goes.

Still, 700 nits isn't all that bad and should provide a comfortable viewing experience in most scenarios, but it trails behind the competition for sure.

Refresh rate

The system offers four refresh rate modes - 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz and Auto-switch. The names of these modes are pretty self-explanatory, so we explored the automatic mode further.

Since this is an LTPO panel, it supports granular refresh rate control, which we observed in various cases. For instance, leaving the display idle will lower the refresh rate down to 10Hz and interacting with it will boost that to 120Hz in most apps we've tried. When it comes to video playback in YouTube, for example, the system will opt for the appropriate refresh rate - 60fps videos will play at 60Hz, 30fps videos run at 30Hz, but 24fps videos play at 60Hz.

Battery life

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

The handset earned a respectable 13:29h Active Use Score, which is more than what you could expect from most devices in the same price range.

The Camon 30 Premier uses a 5,000 mAh battery, which is tasked to power a large 6.77-inch OLED display and a Dimensity 8200 SoC. Interestingly, the OLED is of the LTPO kind, which probably saves some power, and as evidenced by the tests, the Dimensity 8200 takes it easy on the battery as well.

As you can see, the Tecno Camon 30 Premier's overall score is slightly better than all smartphones in this group, although the handset doesn't stand out with great scores in either test. Instead, Tecno's competitor plays the role of "jack of all trades". The handset is competitive in all aspects and posts one of the best gaming runtimes in this comparison. Solid endurance, for sure.

Charging speed

The Camon 30 Premier offers a competitive 70-watt charging solution with its bundled brick and appropriate USB-A to USB-C cable. In our tests, the device did remarkably well, falling short only to the Redmi Note 13 Pro+ with its 120W charging.

Tecno's contender is also neck to neck with the vivo V30 Pro, and the latter beats it to the punch with two minutes at a full charging cycle.

In any case, the Camon is particularly fast in the first 15 minutes, while a 30-minute charge would most probably give a full charge if you aren't doing a full cycle.

Speakers

The Camon 30 Premier has a standard hybrid speaker setup, the bottom-firing speaker being the main one and the other doubles as an earpiece. As usual, the bottom speaker is slightly louder, but not by much in this particular case.

Right off the bat, we are impressed with the loudness, and the "Excellent" -21.9 LUFS score attests to that. It's one of the loudest smartphones we've tested.

Unfortunately, this comes at a price, and that's quality, or at least at higher volumes. The highs start to ring, and there's noticeable distortion, but turning the volume down a few notches helps. The bass is okay and gives music tracks that much-needed fullness.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.