Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “TECNO Phantom V Review: A Fold For The Price Of A Flip”.
This video is sponsored by surf shark ever since they first hit the market. Four years ago, large format foldables have faced three major challenges: they’re big they’re, fragile and they’re expensive. Well, manufacturers like xiaomi and Oppo have begun to solve the size issue. Samsung has started to offer some pretty inclusive repair options, at least in the United States, and now a company you’ve, probably never heard of, has released a foldable that undercuts those competitors by hundreds of dollars. I’M Michael Fisher and I’ve spent a week with the Phantom v-fold from techno.
Now, if that brand name is ringing a bell beyond the electric six song, this isn’t techno’s. First time on, Mr mobile techno was the brand behind that crazy color, changing collaboration with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the slab phone that became a Mondrian painting when you brought it into the sun with its recycled plastic back plate. That feels vaguely like wax paper. The Phantom v-fold is much less flashy than the mondrion, but it’s also much more important because by some measures this is a much better foldable than it has any right to be.
The big display has a Barely There crease, not quite an Oppo territory, but less visible than the honor magic vs. I covered a couple weeks back. Both inner and cover screens are smooth 120 hertz panels and each is wide enough to get real work done with a 21×9 aspect on the outside and a 7.85 inch diagonal inside in the Box, the phone comes with a 45 watt charger and a case. The kind of case that carries a kickstand to prop the phone up for when you need to head to YouTube to relearn how to tie a double Windsor necktie knot.
Yep still haven’t learned how to do this, since my Oppo Find N2 flip review, but I am learning anyway. I got that tie tied and then took the Techno to tie one on at the wedding of some dear friends at a gorgeous venue in Brooklyn. Now, whether it was the decor or the lighting or the sheer photogenicity of my friends, the Phantom V did a much better job than I expected of capturing the spirit of the evening. So long as folks stayed still and stayed in the light more on this momentarily.
I didn’t have to wait long to test the life of that five thousand milliamp hour battery either, because just a day after moving into the Phantom b-fold, I was on route to the NTT upgrade conference in San Francisco beginning my travel day with a lift ride at 9Am, I did all the things I’ve gotten used to leaning on my foldables for checking email registering for the event to which I’m flying making sure that that flight is on time, taking the occasional photo and taking notes on all that. So I can remember it when the time comes to tell you about it about an hour of that and a boarding pass scan later, I’m at the airport at 90 percent, but I run into a problem with the phone, not recognizing the swipe, to go home gesture. So I reboot it and by the time I’m in my seat streaming De La Soul into my boses, I’m at 82 percent. I spend the flight doing the kind of things you do when you’re a techno tuber coming up on his 40th birthday booking brunch reservations for the big day shopping for an imitation version of the chair.
He probably still won’t be able to afford on his 50th birthday and oh yeah doing work, so he can keep his job until then, when the gogo in-flight internet on the ancient Delta bird gets so unusable. That work is no longer possible. It’S on to Kindle and YouTube with podcasts and Spotify streaming in between and betwixted it all filming the kinds of things that flap the wings of a plain Nerd Like Me, you’ll notice, sadly, that not all of the Techno footage is in 4k here, because the phone Frequently resets my resolution preference to full HD in a seemingly random pattern that sucks. In short, I put the phone to the heaviest non-gaming usage possible by 3 20 PM. I hit the low power warning at 20 and by switching to power saving mode, I managed to eke out another couple hours with the Phantom V finally giving up the ghost at 5 15 about 8 hours after I started with more than seven of those hours spent With the screen on honestly not bad, sadly, my early enthusiasm for this phone began to wane shortly after reaching the West Coast. Stick with me, through a word from my sponsor and I’ll explain as you may have noticed, I’m back on the road this year, and that means my sponsor surfshark is back in my taskbar.
It’S not that I don’t trust airport or hotel Wi-Fi, but when I’m rushing around in travel mode, I worry that I might mistake a fraudulent public network for an authentic one. That’S called an evil twin attack by the way well, by using a VPN like surfshark. I can make sure that all the data I’m sending while I’m on the go is encrypted, which keeps me safer. Also. It keeps me in control by making it harder for a service provider to throttle or limit my connection in order to squeeze me for more money. Speaking of money, save some get surf shark at the link in the description and use code, Mr mobile for 83 off and three extra months, free thanks to surfshark for sponsoring this video. Before I get to the rough spots, it really seems, like techno, put some thought into the Phantom v-fold and that’s apparent in the Android 13 based High OS software. I appreciate little conveniences like the persistent dock.
That shows you the last three apps you’ve used, which speeds up multitasking much the same way. The app switcher does, with its useful multi-pane approach and additional shortcuts. If you pair particular apps together, there’s even a feature that uses the camera to check to see if you’re. Looking at the phone, when you close it, if you are it’ll light up the outer screen to let you continue and if not it’ll lock, let’s clever, there’s a proper selfie mode, so you can easily use the main camera for self-portraits. Even the suggested apps widget is useful, except for when it just turns into a creepy smiley face that winks and blows kisses at you. Even then, I don’t exactly hate it.
I just find it weird, but this is still a budget conscious, foldable still sometime from launch built by a company that makes most of its money at the low end. So there’s no flex mode. The hinge is either open or closed. The displays are substantially dimmer than other foldables, so it can be a struggle to read them on a sunny day and auto brightness is very slow.
The haptic system is bad vibes all the way through with cheap feeling, vibration, motor and my beginner’s luck with that camera faded. When I tried to use it in the dim lighting of NTT upgrade every shot required, substantial snap seating to make it usable and shooting side by side with the Galaxy fold 4 in the broader setting of Greater San Francisco. Broadly speaking, everything from the HDR to the color science to low light performance suffered video has some truly extreme exposure shifts and an annoying propensity to reset that exposure every few seconds, even when I’m not accidentally tapping on the curved edge of the cover screen, which is Very annoying and even out some of those earlier wedding photos, skin tones were often just and any moving subject. If you think Samsung has shutter lag problems, you can’t escape my techno and pre-release though it is, I still need to report on the bugs.
They started with that disappearing home gesture in the airport and really started taking hold on the west coast. The notification count on the always on display has been hung at 12., since I turned it on for a while. I couldn’t open the gallery to look at a photo. I had just snapped.
The app would just hang at about the same time, telegram started, locking up and then the phone just started rebooting and even if it all worked fine, even if this is the rare case of a review device really being defective, there are just too many vestiges of Android’S bad old days in high OS this dumb smart panel to the left instead of the Google feed a memory cleaner tool, you can’t remove a persistent notification, that’s required to enable some of techno’s gestures. If you can Envision a China Market Android Tablet from four years ago, you probably get what this is like to use problem for most watching this, because just like most fun phones, this one won’t be coming to the US. I mean if you do import it, it should function fairly well on T-Mobile’s 4G and 5G bands in urban areas, San Francisco and Brooklyn were fine and it’s powered by the same dimensity 9000 plus that made the Oppo Find N2 flip, so sprightly, but honestly, affordable is A relative term I mean, if you can, budget for 1100 bucks. You can also probably afford the 1550 that a Galaxy fold 4 currently gets on Amazon and you’ll, be getting a fourth generation product with water resistance, wireless charging, how almost better everything [ Applause ]. But you know, that’s really not the point is it for the markets for which it’s intended: Latin America, Africa, India and Asia. The Phantom v-fold is really just what it needs to be a lower cost option that brings the foldable fun a little bit downrange and, as someone who’s been pretty outspoken about the need for more competition, a phone – that’s 38, cheaper than the list price of the most Well-Known foldable is exactly the kind of price pressure this segment needs, so I hope techno continues to evolve the Phantom v-fold despite its drawbacks. This is a much stronger start than I anticipated a better foldable than you might expect from a brand, and most folks have never heard of I’m already eager to see the next one. This video was produced following one week with a phantom b-fold provided by techno a pre-production device running pre-release software, as always a manufacturer had no editorial control or other influence over this content.
Not even an early preview techno is seeing it for the first time right alongside you, oh and a heads up. I’Ve got a special episode of my series into the fold coming up to talk about the things that make a foldable fold subscribe to the Mr Mobile on YouTube. So you don’t miss your chance to learn all about hinges coming soon until next time from Michael Fisher. Thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends .