Tecno has over the years gained traction to become a household name here in Kenya for a reason – the brand offers some interesting combination of feature set and price, just enough to woo Kenyans looking for their next smartphone. And while there’s a ton of reasons to place the brand within the entry-level market segment, it’s latest gadget, the Tecno Pova goes further to give gamers a reason, to have it within their shopping list alongside other game-centered devices.
Budget hasn’t always been associated with gaming, the best gaming devices are mostly expensive, due to the fact they’ll mostly have additional hardware for the purpose or have the latest and greatest hardware to handle tasking games. The Tecno Pova which is already official in some countries like India, is aimed at gamers and packs some ingesting features the company believes is enough to handle most android titles.
What is under the hood?
The standout feature on the handset is obviously its massive 6000mAh battery the company believes should last 30 days on a standby mode or 8 days on continuous music playing. This is all from the phone maker’s research and development department and it’ll be interesting to see just how the device performs in real life situation. And if it matters, you should be able to fill-up the battery capacity in no time, thanks to a dual charging IC chip incorporated to achieve 18W flash charge. With just 10 minutes of charging, you should get up to 2.4 hours of talk time or 20hours playing music according to the company.
Under the hood, we get a Helio G80 octa-core processor the company assures can handle any title thrown at it. And from our previous benchmarks, the chipset should be capable in its own respect to run those heavy games like it’s nothing. The phone has some king of intelligent manager that conveniently adjusts the CPU and GPU performance depending on the current task. While you should expect optimal performance when gaming, the device’s resources are well managed under light load to save on battery.
Gaming requires a lot of RAM and adequate internal storage to install those large games and Tecno has gone out of its way to ensure users get the best experience they can. Pova has 128GB internal storage alongside 6GB RAM that should allow fluent multitasking and a smoother gaming experience. To manage heating instances while gaming, the company has deployed a thermal conductive material and 3D multi-layer to aid in heat dissipation and effectively reduce the rise of charging temperature.
Photography hasn’t been left behind either, there’s a quad-camera setup at the rear panel including 13MP primary sensor, 2MP macro sensor, 2MP depth sensor and an AI camera, complemented by a quad led flash. on the front panel, there’s an 8MP selfie snapper, which conveniently utilizes dual LED flash on both of its sides to capture photos in all kinds of environments.
The front panel isn’t much of a treat though, the panel is just large enough at 6.8-inch for users to enjoy gaming, but terribly lacks in resolution at 720 x 1640 pixels. We also don’t get an OLED display that could have pumped those colors to our liking and expect to play games at a lower refresh rate of 60Hz. Most gaming-themed devices coming out now are embracing higher screen refresh rates and it’s disappointing to see Tecno lack behind in this arena. We currently don’t have an official availability date in the country, but will update as soon as possible with pricing.