A first look at Tecno’s Phantom V Fold, a surprisingly affordable foldable phone

Tecno, a relatively unknown mobile brand in our part of the world, surprised us with a pop-out portrait lens on its Phantom X2 Pro flagship phone last December. For today’s MWC event, the Chinese company brought us the Phantom V Fold, which is the first horizontally-folding phone powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000+ processor (hello, Oppo Find N2 Flip!), rather than something from at Qualcomm. This usually means a lower barrier to entry, which is always a good thing.

Like Honor’s Magic VS and Xiaomi’s Mix Fold 2, the Phantom V Fold opts for a body that’s wider than its Samsung counterparts – not as wide as Oppo’s. Tecno’s “almost crease-free” foldable screen comes in at 7.85 inches with a 2,296 x 2,000 resolution, and on the other side, you’re greeted with a 6.42-inch 2,550 x 1,080 sub-screen. Both AMOLED panels have a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. As far as durability, the claim here is that “the device is capable of 200,000 times,” which is equivalent to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4, although this is only half of what the competition in China has achieved today new.

The Phantom V Fold has a complete set of cameras, too. On the rear side, there is a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel telephoto camera (2x optical zoom) and a 13-megapixel ultra-wide camera. It is surrounded by an eco-friendly back cover – in black or white – made of recycled plastics. Then you get two punch-hole selfie cameras: a 16-megapixel on the foldable screen, and a 32-megapixel version on the outer screen. The latter is fine for video calls on that small screen, but you might want to unfold the phone and use the main camera for better selfies.

Tecno isn’t cheap on the battery here either. The Phantom V Fold has a 5,000mAh battery with 45W fast charging. It reaches a 40-percent charge in 15 minutes, or a 100-percent charge in 55 minutes. That’s a little slower than the Chinese competition, but it still beats the Galaxy Z Fold 4 — if you don’t mind missing out on wireless charging.

On the software side, the Phantom V Fold runs on Tecno’s HiOS 13 Fold based on Android 13. The company claims that it has optimized the folding experience of its device for the top 1,000 most downloaded apps worldwide , and 90 percent of them are also optimized. for split-screen and multi-window modes.

So how much cheaper is the Phantom V Fold? Well, not bad. The base model with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage costs $1,099, while the 512GB variant asks for $1,222. It is very competitive compared to Samsung and even Honor outside of China, although the prices vary by country – which is India, in this case, followed by various countries in Africa and Latin America where usually Tecno is active.