Tecno Phantom X2 review

6.8", 120Hz AMOLED display

The Tecno Phantom X2 has a large display with a 6.8-inch diagonal, which is especially impressive considering the phone is only 72.7mm in width. The OLED panel here is curved on both sides, and it's covered by Gorilla Glass Victus. The screen even has a 120Hz refresh rate. The resolution is 1080 x 2400 pixels.

This display appears to be identical to the one on the Phantom X2 Pro. This is also evidenced by the fact that just like its Pro sibling, the vanilla model manages a brightness of just over 500 nits on the slider.

Unlike the Pro, however, the vanilla has a functioning max auto brightness boost mode at the time of writing. Using it, we managed to measure 710 nits of brightness from the display. This leads us to believe that whatever was going on with the Phantom X2 Pro during its review was likely a bug, leaving it stuck at 500 nits. Hopefully, that's a bug that can and will get fixed with an update. With a little over 700 nits at its disposal, the Phantom X2 is definitely mode usable outdoors, though still not particularly great.

It seems that color accuracy is not a strong suit of the Phantom X2 family. Just like its sibling, the Phantom X2 has a pair of color modes - bright and original.

Color modes

Both of these aim for the DCI-P3 color space but miss the mark by a fair bit. Bright mode is distinctly cold in temperature with exaggerated blues, whereas original mode dials back things quite a bit but whites and grays are still a bit too blue to be considered color-accurate.

Unfortunately, the Phantom X2 lacks HDR support on its display. That's definitely something we would have liked to see out of a flagship. The phone and its chipset can still decode HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG just fine, though. In terms of DRM, we are happy to say that the Phantom X2 has the highest Widevine L1 certification. This allows streaming services like Netflix to offer HD and greater quality.

HDR decoding • Widevine • Netflix playback capabilities

We couldn't download Netflix from the Google Play Store, but we had to fetch the APK from the Palm store, which is also pre-loaded on the phone. We believe this is a blacklisting issue on Netflix's part which will hopefully get cleared up since the phone already seems to be whitelisted within the app itself for FullHD streaming.

High refresh rate handling

The Phantom X2 has a total of two refresh rate modes - 60Hz and 120Hz. There are no other in-between modes, like 90Hz, supported by the display and its controller. Regarding software modes, the phone has three modes of operation - 60Hz, 120Hz and "Auto-switch Refresh Rate".

Refresh rate modes

60Hz mode works as expected. It just locks the refresh rate at 60Hz. The Auto mode and 120Hz mode do the same thing, which is odd. In our testing, we saw 120Hz mode trigger the actual 120Hz refresh rate more consistently than Auto, but that's about it.

In auto mode, the Phantom X2 Pro stays in 120Hz mode as long as you are either interacting with the screen or there is some movement on the screen. That is solid logic overall.

Automatic refresh rate switching

The Phantom X2 Pro is also smart enough to toggle 60Hz mode and sticks to it for certain apps like YouTube so as not to waste any unnecessary battery power.

60Hz in YouTube

Unfortunately, the same logic is not applied to the default local video player. That player always stays at 120Hz, which is a waste. Many other video players within apps, like Facebook or TikTok, also trigger 120Hz mode for as long as a video is being played, which is less than ideal.

120Hz in the default video player

Naturally, we tried a few games we know support rendering beyond 60fps and can confirm that all of these successfully triggered the 120Hz mode and made use of the extra headroom to render beyond 60fps. This means that, barring some bugs in behavior, the Phantom X2 is perfectly suited for high refresh rate gaming. You might want to stick to 120Hz mode in display settings to ensure that games will work in high refresh rate mode.

High refresh rate gaming

All things considered, the Phantom X2 handles its high refresh rate decently well. There is plenty of room for improvement, though. The available modes are confusing and overlap to some extent. Plus, adding the option for 90Hz and incorporating that into the auto-switching behavior would be a great improvement.

Battery life

The Phantom X2 has the same large 5,160 mAh battery as the X2 Pro. Given that the two phones share the same display and identical chipsets, we naturally expected very similar battery results from them, and that's exactly what we got.

Consistency is always great, and the Phantom X2 managed an excellent 110 hours of total endurance in our proprietary testing.

Just like on the Phantom X2 Pro, the display of the X2 proved to be a bit of a battery hog, particularly while operating at 120Hz. Nothing that the battery management couldn't handle, though, but still worth noting.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage patterns, check out our all-time battery test results chart, where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging speed

The Phantom X2 has the exact same battery capacity and 45W charging as its bigger Pro sibling.

We wouldn't call its charging rate particularly speedy in the grand scheme of things, but it is decent enough. In our testing, we managed to get the phone from zero to 36% in 15 minutes and 62% in 30 minutes. A full charge took just over an hour.

Speaker test

The Phantom X2 has a single bottom-firing speaker at its disposal. There isn't even a hybrid stereo setup, which is pretty disappointing on a flagship device.

Apparently, the speaker is another thing Tecno managed to tune better with an update since, at the time of testing, the Phantom X2 managed to be notably louder than its X2 Pro sibling even though the two seemingly share most of their hardware. Another explanation would be that the vanilla has more internal space left over thanks to the omission of the pop-out portrait telephoto camera and hence a bigger echo chamber for its speaker.

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.