You may not have come across the Tecno brand before, and we weren't too familiar ourselves, until recently. The Chinese brand has focused on budget devices for developing markets for most of its history, and in doing so, has grown to become the top-selling smartphone brand in Africa.

Now though, Tecno is looking to make a splash elsewhere, and has launched a flagship foldable device that's designed to duke it out with the industry's best.

It's called the Phantom V Fold, and that's the device we're taking a look at here. It has impressive specs and an attractive price point, but with an unfamiliar manufacturer, we had more than a few questions on our minds.

What will the build quality be like? How well-optimised will the software be? Are the cameras any good? We were itching to find out, and after switching to it as our main device, here's what we learned.

Design

• Dimensions folded: 159.4 x 71.95 x 14.15 mm
• Dimensions unfolded: 159.4 x 140.4 x 6.9 mm
• Weight: 299 grams
• Black and white colour options, recycled plastic back

The Phantom V Fold makes a great first impression, the hardware looks and feels premium, and the phone has a very unique finish. The back panel is made from a recycled plastic material, and it has a texture that feels something like fancy craft paper. We've never seen a phone like it, and we think it looks and feels great.

In practical terms, the back of the phone is completely fingerprint-resistant, as well as extremely grippy. It's very refreshing in a market that's filled with shiny, slippery, glass-backed phones. Plus, the fact that it's somewhat environmentally friendly is a nice bonus.

The sides and hinge mechanism are made from an aluminium alloy that's cool to the touch, while the outer screen is coated with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus. It's a mostly flat outer display, with a subtle curve on the right-hand edge.

There's a sizable centrally-placed camera array on the rear of the phone. This is coated in glass with a dark finish that creates some unique reflections when it catches the light. The effect reminds us of the lid on the Asus ZenBook Fold OLED, though it's a touch more subtle on this device.

There's minimal branding to be found on the device, only the word "Phantom" in a shiny silver font on the rear panel, so it's very tasteful. We didn't realise it at first, but Phantom is actually a sub-brand of Tecno, kind of like Redmi is to Xiaomi. In this case, the Phantom name is reserved for the brand's flagship devices.

There's a lovely aramid-fibre case included in the box, which is an excellent addition. It comes complete with an integrated kickstand, so you can prop it up on a table to watch videos on the interior display. It's a slimline case and it only protects the rear portion of the phone, so it's not the most protective solution, but it does look lovely.

The Phantom V Fold weighs in at around 299 grams, making it one of the heavier folding phones on the market, but it's also one of the largest. The outer display, in particular, is noticeably wider than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4, which makes using it feel more like a traditional smartphone - just twice as thick.

Just like the Z Fold 4, the fingerprint scanner is placed on the power button, alongside a volume rocker on the right-hand side of the phone. Unlike the Samsung though, this scanner is very prone to phantom activations, and the phone frequently buzzes signalling a fingerprint mismatch when you pick it up.

It's not the end of the world, but it's slightly annoying. On the plus side, when you're actually trying to use it, the fingerprint scanner is rapid and reliable.

Display and speakers

• Outer display: 6.42 inch 120Hz LTPO AMOLED
  • 1080 x 2550 FHD+ resolution, Gorilla Glass Victus

• Inner display: 7.85 inch 120Hz LTPO AMOLED
  • 2296 x 2000 2K+ resolution, UTG coating

• Dual stereo speakers

As you might expect, with a large format folding phone, the displays are a real highlight on this device. Both the interior and exterior display have a speedy 120Hz refresh rate and use LTPO tech to adjust the refresh rate on the fly, conserving battery life.

Both displays are able to output around 1100 nits peak brightness, which is just shy of the Z Fold 4's 1200 nits, but close enough to be very comparable. In use, we found the outer display to have no issues competing with bright sunlight, however, the foldable inner display struggles a bit more due to its uneven surface reflections.

When it comes to resolution, and physical size, the Phantom V Fold has a leg up over the market leader. Not only is almost a centimetre larger on both axes (unfolded), but it has more pixels to work with, too.

Both displays are crisp and smooth with vibrant colours and excellent contrast. As far as we can tell, though, there's no HDR10+ or Dolby Vision certification, which may be off-putting to some users. For what it's worth, HDR content looks great on YouTube, but you might not get the optimal experience from all streaming platforms.

The usual folding screen caveats apply to this device, of course. The interior display with its UTG coating feels a bit plasticky and your finger won't glide over it as smoothly as a real glass screen. It also picks up fingerprint smudges more easily, though you'll rarely notice them when the display is on.

There is a visible crease, but it's less noticeable than Samsung's, and it's almost imperceptible when viewed head-on. It's very impressive for a first outing.

It's worth mentioning, too, that there's almost no gap when folded and small plastic ridges ensure that no dust or pocket debris can make its way into the hinge mechanism.

One thing that bugs us is the placement of the internal selfie camera. When viewing a video in full-screen mode, the punch-hole selfie cut-out sits at the bottom right of the image, just outside of the black bars. If the camera had been placed on the right-hand side, as we saw on the Huawei Mate Xs 2, then it wouldn't interfere with content at all.

It's a minor thing, but it's annoying nonetheless. Especially since the internal selfie camera isn't something we have felt the need to use at all. Though if you use your phone for a lot of video conferencing, you may feel differently.

There are dual stereo speakers found on the top and bottom of the phone, when folded. When unfolded, they sit on either side of the top portion of the display. We found them quite easy to muffle when the phone was folded, but when it's unfolded they work much better.

The speakers are pretty unremarkable, that said. They're loud enough to hear what's going on properly and there's plenty of clarity, but not much in the way of bass response. They'll get the job done, but don't expect to be wowed and keep a nice set of earbuds handy.

Performance and software

• MediaTek Dimensity 9000+
• 12GB RAM, 256GB or 512GB storage
• 5000 mAh battery, 45W charging (wired only)
• HiOS 13 Fold (based on Android 13)

The Phantom V Fold runs on the Dimensity 9000+ SoC, which is last year's flagship MediaTek chip, and although it's been succeeded by the more powerful 9200, it's still a highly capable chipset.

In real terms, we were able to max out the settings on Genshin Impact and play on the large interior display at 60fps with only the occasional stutter. Dropping to high settings at 60fps, everything remained smooth and fluid, even during intense battles.

The Phantom never got too warm, either, even during extended gaming sessions, and we really enjoyed playing with the extra screen real estate. Some titles work better than others, as the UI has to scale to the unusually-square aspect ratio, but all of our favourites were perfectly playable.

Outside of gaming, all of our other tasks were smooth and snappy, with apps remaining fast and responsive even during multitasking.

The Phantom V Fold runs Techno's HiOS 13 Fold skin, based on Android 13, and for the most part, we got along quite well with it. It's a fairly heavy skin and takes the Apple / Xiaomi approach of separating out your notification shade and quick settings, but this is easy to get used to.

We were most nervous about the software, as this is the first time that we've gone hands-on with a Tecno device. But, thankfully, it was stable, with minimal bugs and it has some fairly well-executed multi-tasking functionality built in.

Tecno says that over 2000 apps have been optimised to work with the V Fold's form factor, including the top 500 Play Store apps based on global download frequency. This meant that everything we tried worked pretty much flawlessly across the outer and inner displays, as well as with multi-window modes.

The software experience wasn't all perfect, though. First of all, there's a bunch of bloatware when you first set up the device. This ranges from things like file managers and RAM cleaners to Facebook and the bizarrely named Carl Cleaner, whatever that may be. Tecno is far from the worst offender, but still, we'd appreciate less bloatware.

The other thing we weren't so keen on was the lack of a Google Discover feed when you swipe left. Instead, you get Tecno's Zero Screen, which offers things like a step counter, tips, and countdowns to important dates (and it deems Saturday an important date, which we found amusing).

Strangely, we found that the Zero Screen would request permissions access every time we visited it (usually accidentally) but, in fairness, this was the only bug we ran into throughout our testing. In the grand scheme of things, it's a very minor one, so hats off to Tecno for that. Plus, you can easily disable the Zero Screen entirely, which we chose to do as we didn't find it very useful.

The Phantom V Fold packs a 5,000mAh battery, which is considerably larger than Samsung's, and it supports 45W charging, which is much faster, too. However, it does lack any kind of wireless charging support.

We found the battery life to be sufficient for our needs, easily seeing us through an average day's usage, though it only just scraped by when we took part in some big-screen gaming action. Charging from flat takes less than an hour, which is plenty fast enough for us, too.

Cameras

• 50MP f/1.85 main
• 50MP 2x telephoto
• 13MP ultra-wide
• 16MP internal selfie camera
• 32MP external selfie camera

The cameras are another aspect that we were initially quite nervous about, With no previous experience with the Tecno brand, could this be the area that lets the device down?

Thankfully, that's not the case, and the Phantom V Fold's vast array of cameras perform well, for the most part. The highlight, as usual, is the optically stabilised main camera, but the 50MP 2x lens is useful in its own right. The 13MP ultra-wide struggles in lower lighting conditions, but it's decent when the light is in its favour, even if it can't manage the same fidelity as the other two lenses.

The main thing that lacks, compared to competing devices, is image processing. Photos from the Phantom V Fold just aren't as vibrant as other devices, especially in overcast weather, where everything just looks dull. When HDR is active, images come out looking a little washed out, with a slight shift toward the cooler colour temperatures.

You can fix the colours in your preferred image editor, of course, but the images that you get straight from the camera just aren't as poppy and eye-catching as those produced by competitors.

The portrait mode is another area that's slightly below standard, it's not bad, by any means, but it's not on the level of other flagship devices. It gets confused more easily and difficult areas like hair come out looking quite jagged and unnatural.

One area of the processing that surprised us, though, was night mode. Here the images came out looking sharp, vibrant and detailed - with only slightly less dynamic range than you'd find with Google or Samsung devices.

There are two selfie cameras on the Phantom, and you can also use the main camera to take selfies - there are a lot of options. The 32MP punch-hole camera on the secondary display is very good, producing lots of detail. While the 16MP camera on the interior is far less impressive. It's fine for video calls, but we'd avoid using it for photos.

In terms of video shooting, it's a similar story to photography. You can shoot at up to 4K 60fps on the main sensor, and the detail and overall fidelity are good, but the electronic image stabilisation lags behind the top brands. You can turn "Ultra-steady" on, which helps it out, but doing so results in a significant crop.

Otherwise, the results are good, it focuses reliably and smoothly with minimal pulsing - especially if you tap to tell it what to focus on. Plus the ability to use the main camera to film yourself can be very handy for anyone looking to create vlog-style content.

Verdict

The Phantom V Fold is an extremely impressive debut foldable device, and that's before we even get to its price point. It should retail for around $1100 (or $979 with an early bird discount), making it around half as expensive as the Galaxy Z Fold 4 at MSRP - and that's a bit of a bargain.

After living with it as our main device, we've found ourselves with very few complaints. The main things that bothered us were the size and weight, but the same could be said for any tablet-style foldable.

The other niggles we had were entirely on the software side, so in theory, Tecno could address these in future firmware updates - whether that will happen remains to be seen.

Another question mark is the availability. We know the device will debut in India, and though it's classed as a global launch, we don't know exactly which markets it'll be coming to.

We hope that Tecno manages to spread this phone far and wide, as this aggressive price point might be exactly what the foldable market needs. If you can get hold of it, it's easy to recommend.