A few days ago, Tecno posted an image of a box with the inscription “Phantom A III” on the side, and “3″ at the top of the box. At this point we can call the Phantom, a menace. The post showed up on its Tecno Mobile Nigeria and Tecno Mobile Ghana pages on Facebook and Twitter.

Here are both posts.

The Tecno Phantom A3… GET READY!!! pic.twitter.com/1oZhTxedbj

— Tecno Mobile Nigeria (@TecnoMobileNG) November 9, 2013

A large number of Nigerians have embraced Tecno’s range of Androidphones. Although this has also split Nigerian Android fans into the Samsung and Tecno camps. You’ll be the first to know when Tecno releases the specs of the Phantom A3

Tecno recently unveiled the new entry to its Phantom lineup – the Tecno Phantom A2. It joins its elder brothers, the Phantom A and Phantom A+ in Tecno’s Android range. Let’s go right down to the specifications.

The Phantom A2 runs Android 4.2 on a 1.2GHz Quad Core CPU with 1GB of RAM. Internal Memory stands at 4GB and you can expand this up to 32GB via a microSD card.

The smartphone, also dubbed the F8, retains the same form factor as the other phantom phones and has a 5.7-inch capacitive touch screen display, making it the largest Tecno phone yet. You might even call it a Phablet. The resolution of the F8′s display isn’t so impressive at 720 x 1280 pixels.

Tecno has ramped up the rear camera on the Phantom A2 to 13 megapixels. The rear camera  with LED flash is capable of taking pictures at a resolution of 4128×3096. The rear camera isn’t the only thing that’s ramped up. The smartphone has a front 8 megapixel camera for video calls and the times when you don’t have a mirror. It takes pictures at a resolution of 3264×2448 pixels.

The Phantom A2 is dual sim capable and can connect to data networks up to 3.75G. For power it has a 2630mAh battery that promises to last for 17.3 hours of talk time and 280 hours on standby. We’ve not been told how long it’ll last when it’s used for data.

Other connectivity options are WiFi with hotspot capabilities, bluetooth 3.0, GPS, a USB port and an earphone port. Sensors installed are a G-Sensor, proximity sensor and a light sensor.

The Phatom A2 is available in black and white colours and ecno provides an 8GB microSD card and a powerbank in the box.

At the market, the Tecno Phantom A2(F8) costs between ₦44,000 and ₦46,000. If you wish to order from an online store, compare prices on PriceCheck.

Tecno Mobile, is currently in a dispute with the Computer and Allied Products Dealers Association of Nigeria (CAPDAN), ThisDay reports.

CAPDAN alleges that Tecno is behind a recent raid of Computer Village by the Standards Organisation of Nigeria. The raid included the confiscation of sub-standard mobile phones by SON. Computer Village claim Tecno did this to gain a upper hand and control market share.

The dispute has led to the pulling down of Tecno banners, posters and other paraphernalia by traders in the Computer Village. Some have even stopped selling Tecno products entirely.

Tecno on the other hand claims it isn’t sure what the problem is as the SON is an independent organisation and it has no hands in the raid. The company has called for dialogue to resolve the issues with both parties.

It’s important to remember that the early crop of Tecno phones into the country were sub-standard products. They were usually too loud and most times, unfixable. In the last year however, Tecno has stepped up its game with its Android-running line of products – including the N3, N7, Phantom A and Phantom A+.

We’ll keep you updated as more details are released.

Source: ThisDay Live

Tecno has decided they’ll never stop amazing us with their Android phones. The Tecno Phantom A+ is a step up from the Tecno Phantom A F7.

We’ll go right to the specifications of the Phantom A plus.

The Phantom A+ runs on Android 4.2 Jellybean and is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU. Remember the Phantom A, has a dual-core CPU of 1GHz. Internal memory stands at 4GB while an external memory card of 8GB is added in the box. It has a RAM of IGB. Yes, this Tecno is also dual SIM capable.

It retains the same form factor as the Phantom A with a 5-inch TFT display of resolution 720 x 1280 pixels.

On the camera side, it has an 8 megapixel rear camera with flash and a 1.2 megapixel front camera for video calling. The rear camera takes pictures at a resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels. Connectivity options include 3G and EDGE, WiFi, a USB port, Bluetooth, GPS and an earphone slot.

Tecno is playing a Samsung from a few years back and hitting the market with as many midrange phones as they can. Samsung on the other hand, seems to be focusing on more expensive phones – giving room for brands like Tecno and Infinix.

Tecno recently annoucned the Phantom A F7- the latest phone in its lineup of Android smartphones.

The Phantom A runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean on a 1GHz dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of internal memory. External memory up to 32GB can be added via a microSD card.

On the design, Tecno says it got French designers to work on this particular phone although you’ll call it a Samsung Galaxy S3 if you didn’t know. Available in Black and White, the Phantom A is 9.1mm thin and looks like it packs a lot of weight. It also has a 5.0 TFT screen with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. Note that it’s a TFT screen so it’s not going to be as bright as the AMOLED screens you see on Samsung’s phones.

Like all of the Tecno phones we’ve seen recently, the Phantom A F7 has dual sim cabapilities.

The smartphone packs an 8 megapixel front camera with flash, capable of shooting 30fps of video at 720p. It capture images at a resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels. The front camera on the other hand is a disappointing 1.2 megapixel.

For connectivity, the Phantom A has WiFi, GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Bluetooth, a USB port and a 3.5mm earphone port.

The price  the Phantom A is currently around N34,000. For the specs, this phone packs, it’s a great price.

What do you think about the specs of the Phantom A? Can it be a bestseller like its predecessors, the Tecno N3 and Tecno N7? Please leave a comment.

In the small messaging app eats large corporation’s messaging app world, Tecno’s Palmchat is the new one the block. The Chinese have refused to carry last. In the last year we’ve seen Tencent’s WeChat grow astronomically alongside Line, Viber and WhatsApp. They’re growing so fast, Google just had to launch Hangouts in competition.

Enter Palmchat: The most likely and yet unlikely contender. I stumbled across it a few days ago when I was checking out 2go for Android. Palmchat is just like any other messaging service but it’s got features from every other messaging service. Here’s the breakdown

User ID

Each Palmchat user is handed an ID. This ID serves the same purpose as a BlackBerry PIN. You can search users by ID and add them up.

Search
Unlike WhatsApp and other messaging platforms which require you to have a contact’s details before you can message them, Palmchat has Look Around and Search By Info features. Look Around shows Palmchat users around you and how close they are to your location. Search By Info lets you search for a user based on different values of information. Just like how you find friends on Skype.

Chatrooms    Because 2go is a serious competitor (2go came pre-installed on the Tecno N3 in the markets where Tecno is growing), Tecno has created chatrooms for Palmchat. Chatrooms range from Romance to Football and allow users exchange messages around various topics. Chatrooms are also the best places to find new friends (and errr.. set P).

Private Messaging

You can’t have a messaging app without this. Like every other app on the market, Palmchat allows you send private messages to another Palmchat user. You can also attach images and audio files. I like that this part has a slightly different interface from what we’re used to. There’s a message bubble or smiley or file and the timestamp comes below the message.

Shake Shake

Shake Shake is a Tecno hookup tool that displays a random profile when you go to that section and shake your phone. I think they just wanted to add some fun to it.

What does Tecno intend to do with this?

It’s pretty obvious. With the speed at which Tecno’s Android and feature phones are eating up the market, Palmchat will be a serious competitor to other messaging apps. All Tecno has to do is pre-install them on every Tecno phone. Just like Samsung is doing with ChatOn. Palmchat currently has between 1,000 and 5,000 downloads via Google Play. That’s just an estimation but the graph is worth looking at. It’s going upwards. In the future we might even see a video call feature within Palmchat. Then Tecno will join the army of telco competitors.

I recently stumbled upon the Tecno N7 while trolling the web. Tecno is really pushing its Android phones into the low-end part of the smartphone market and it seems to be doing great. The company sold over 20 million phones in Nigeria last year.

The Tecno N7 runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on a 5.0-inch TFT touchscreen display with a resolution of 800 x 400 pixels giving it 223 pixels per inch. It’s 11.3mm thin so it’s not something you’ll sit on unknowingly.

Here’s where Tecno decided to shock us. The N7 packs a 1.2GHz dual-core processor. We’re surprised too. The device also packs 500MB of RAM and 4GB internal memory. Extra storage up to 32GB can be added via a microSD slot. As a rule, Tecno has pre-installed an 8GB memory card with this device. 500MB of RAM isn’t so impressive. Seems like a drawback on the processor.

On the camera side, Tecno N7 sports a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash – capable of capturing images at a resolution of 2592х1944 pixels. It records videos up to VGA at 15fps. There’s also a 0.3 megapixel camera for video calling and taking pictures of yourself.

For connectivity, the N7 supports WiFi, EDGE, 3G, Bluetooth and USB connections. It’s got dual-SIM capability and only accepts mini SIM cards. Its 1600 mAh battery lasts 6 hours of music play, 17 hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby.

We’re seeing the Tecno N7 go for between N27,500 to N30,000 on the market. That’s between $180 and $200. For Tecno, that’s a great price point for this phone. It’s predecessor, the Tecno N3 has largely been successful due to pricing and we expect the N7 to do just the same.

We’ll do our best to get our hands on the N7 so we can post a review but for now what do you think about Tecno’s efforts with Android? Can they keep this up?

The Tecno N3 came in sometime last week. Here are opinions and thoughts while using the device. We’ve split it into parts so you can jump right into a section by clicking any of the titles below or you can read the whole thing.

• Design
• Specs and Performance
• Display
• Camera
• Accessories
• Operating System
• Apps
• Battery Life
• Tecno N3 vs. Samsung Galaxy Pocket
• Quick Video Review
• Conclusions

Design

The Tecno N3 is made entirely of plastic.  It’s Light enough yet not too light so it feels like you’re holding a phone. There are volume buttons on the top left, sleep/on button on the top right, 3.5mm audio jack at the top and a micro-USB port at the bottom. The usual home, back and menu buttons for Android are at the bottom. Its camera pops out of the top, right in the middle of the device.

I have the black version with me, it also comes in Red, White and a special Arsenal version pre-loaded with Arsenal content.

The design isn’t mind blowing but it works. As for durability, it fell down once from a stool and the back opened with the battery out. You probably want to get a pouch for this phone.

Specs and Performance

The N3 runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread on an 800Mhz Qualcomm CPU and 512MB of RAM. Internal storage comes at 512MB with an 8GB memory card included. The phone can take external cards up to 32GB. Although the unit in this review has a 256MB RAM so there’s a bit of lagging although it’s not frequent. The device sports WiFi[with hotspot abilities], Bluetooth, A-GPS, an accelerometer and gyroscope are included. The phone has 3G capabilities in places where 3G is available. 3G works fine and I’m quite impressed that it picks up networks better than the BlackBerry Curve 9320.

The Tecno N3 comes with a dual-sim capability and you’re given the ability to tweak certain capabilities of both SIMs. For example you can turn off data completely on one SIM and make the other your primary data SIM. I did find it difficult locating the buttons at night due to its lack of backlight.

Display

The Tecno N3′s screen is a 3.5-inch, HVGA screen with a resolution of 320×480 pixels. It’s bright enough for you to see it in moderate light and in the dark but when it’s super hot and bright like it is in Lagos right now, I had to squint to see the screen when I was on the road.

Camera

Its rear-facing camera is 3.0 megapixels so don’t expect awesome photos. It doesn’t work well in low-light situations, although you can tweak the white balance and exposure. However, images become blurry when you use the zoom option so you’ll want to move as close to your subject as possible when you’re using the camera. The N3 lacks a front-facing camera so there’s a difficulty in making video calls. Here are sample images and a video. The images and video are unedited. This is exactly how they are on the N3.

Here’s a sample video of the Tecno N3′s camera. It works fine during the day although it doesn’t pick colours as well as we expected a 3 megapixel camera to.

Accessories

Tecno’s N3 comes with an earphone, a mini-USB cable and a power plug. The earphones are quite loud so you don’t want to walk the streets of Lagos without tuning down the volume. The internal speakers work fine and like the earphones they can also get pretty loud if you turn the volume up. The screen isn’t protected by scratch proof glass which means a screenguard is required if you want to use this for a long time.

Operating System

The Tecno N3 runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread. That’s an Android operating system from about 2 years ago. It’s not up-to-date but it works just fine. A large number of Apps available for the N3 work well – apps for Social Networking or reading content have no problem. The lock screen has special options to switch to the Phonebook, Messages, Camera and your home screen. Tecno also added a few extra features to the top bar of the notification centre like turning of mobile data or switching between different display brightness options. I really loved the brightness tweaking option. It saves you all that time of going to settings.

If you’re switching from Jelly Bean like I have, the major difference is that you can’t pause, play or fast forward music from the notification centre like you can do in Jelly Bean. You also can’t view notifications from the lock screen. In settings, you’ll notice is that there’s no ability to view how much data you’ve consumed. Another problem is switching from your running app to your home screen and then to menu.

The phone takes a while to load you onto the home screen like you’ll see in our review video. This is probably specific to this phone because that doesn’t happen on Samsung’s Galaxy Pocket. I noticed the Tecno N3 did a bit of refreshing of apps. When I switch away from an app and I want to return, it restarts the app. For browsers like Opera Mini, it refreshes the pages or will sometimes end your session. I’ve been told that happens with a lot of Android devices although I never noticed it on my Nexus 7.

Apps

The N3 Comes with Spinlet and 175 Spinlet credits loaded, a special battery saver app – DX battery saver, Email, Flash Share, Facebook and Opera Mini next. Tecno says they’re working to include 2Go support and Whatsapp functionality so you don’t have to download it. Tecno has pre-installed a special Flash Share app that allows file sharing for Tecno phones. When 2 users wish to share files, they can create a quick account(works offline within Flash Share and transfer files via a specially created network.

The Videos app isn’t great for playing movies so I suggest VLC For Android Beta. Due to the processor of this device, The maximum resolution of videos that can be played is 480p. 720p videos hang all the way. If you like games like Temple Run and Agent Dash, sorry they won’t run on this device. The Music app also works fine. It can play mp3 and midi files. I encountered no problem using it. The hardware isn’t top notch enough to allow you play games that include running and sliding simultaneously. I also noticed large-sized games around 100MB or above won’t just work.

Battery Life

I Charged up the N3′s 1400 mAH battery till its fullest at 9.30 AM and didn’t have to recharge it until 7 PM. Within that time, I had no SIM card on the device so I relied on WiFi for about 4 hours during the day. I also played music throughout that time. When I eventually inserted a sim card and turned on mobile data, the battery lasted about 6 hours. This is largely due to network inconsistency. It should usually last between 8 to 10 hours without recharging. The best part about the Tecno N3′s battery is that the N3 is equipped with the DX Battery Saver  app I mentioned earlier. The app alerts you when your battery is going low and offers to switch to special modes that can turn off certain radio services and even reduce brightness. It also accurately estimates how long it’ll take the phone to get a full charge.

Tecno N3 vs. Samsung Galaxy Pocket

The closest competitors to the N3 are the Saumsung Galaxy Pocket and Etisalat/Huawei’s Gaga. We couldn’t get a Gaga for this review so we’ll compare the N3 with the Galaxy Pocket. The N3 scores better than the Galaxy Pocket in terms of screen size, weight, hardware support and price.

Although, the Galaxy Pocket has more internal storage at 3GB than the Tecno N3, but the N3 comes with an 8GB memory card. Where the Galaxy Pocket trumps the N3 majorly is in its camera. It’s a 2 megapixel camera but it is brighter and takes pictures faster. On durability, the Galaxy Pocket’s back is made of brushed metal so you can let that fall sometimes. The Pocket’s home screen buttons are also backlit which is useful at night.

Quick Video Review

Here’s a quick video review of the Tecno N3

Conclusions

The Tecno N3 wins in terms of pricing and basic specs but loses in the camera and ability to play large apps. It has the potential to reduce the market share of Samsung’s Galaxy Pocket and other near-priced Android phones. When this phone officially hits the market, consumers will be able to buy Tecno N3 units from Airtel and get 40MB data for 6 months, provided they load N1,000 of airtime each month. All you have to do is load the stated amount of airtime.

Tecno is promising even more Android phones in 2013, we’ll be watching to see how much market share they can capture in Nigeria. 95 percent of all phones in China currently run on Android, we’re looking to see if that can happen in the Nigerian market. If you’ve used the Tecno N3, we’ll appreciate it if you leave us a comment about your experience.

Tecno’s low cost N3 just got in a while ago. TIT costs N13,000 which makes it the cheapest smartphone in the Nigerian market. I’m looking to see what power this device has. Here’s how I feel about the device after a few hours with it.

It’s light and still durable. The cover is made of plastic so it feels cheap because it is. The N3 isn’t giving me hassles so far. It runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread – there are a lot of apps that the OS supports.

I recently inserted my SIM card because my other phone died. I had signed in earlier with my Google Account, so all my contacts are here on the Tecno N3. There’s no need to ‘copy-to-SIM’ and then select where contacts should save and appear. Have I said that it has dual-sim capabilities?

The camera isn’t so impressive. It’s the major sacrifice with this device. It doesn’t have a flash so pictures in low-light are an absolute no.

The N3 has a couple of features I’ll explore within the next few days. I’m looking forward to try out the Hotspot and the special Flash Share application with someone else.

A full review of the Tecno N3 will be up next week.