While it hasn’t published it on its official site, Tecno has sent out the new Camon 17 to retailers in Kenya. You can’t have one yet, but you can pre-order it – here’s what you’ll get if you do. At first glance, it is not a straight upgrade over the Tecno 16. For starters, it has a smaller 6.55” screen, down from 6.8”. It’s still a 720p+ class display (though with 20:9 aspect ratio). The selfie camera (still living in a punch hole) has an 8MP sensor (down from 16MP).
It has a slightly more powerful chipset
than the previous generation, a Helio G85. The Mali G52 MC2 GPU runs at a
higher clock speed as do the six A55 CPU cores, while the two A75 cores are the
same. You get the same 4 GB of RAM, but double the storage is doubled to 128
GB. Also, this one comes with Android 11 and HiOS 7.6 out of the box.
Moving on, the camera on the back now
stars a 16MP ultra wide-angle module. Even the Camon 16 Pro and 16 Premier had
only an 8MP ultra wide (the vanilla 16 had none). However, the main camera is
demoted to a 48MP sensor (down from 64MP on the 16-series). A 2MP helper module
rounds off the trio. The new model has a 5,000mAh battery, same as before, and
we’re not seeing any mentions of fast charging. Like its siblings, this is a
dual-SIM phone with 4G LTE connectivity.
The Tecno Camon 17 can be found at an
online retailer in Kenya (follow the Source link). The store was also kind
enough to send us some hands-on photos of the phone: It will cost KES 22,800
(US$ 210/€ 175) and if you want one, you can pre-order a unit with a KES 2,000 down
payment. For comparison, the Camon 16 is KES 19,400, the 16 Pro is KES 20,500
and the 16 Premier is noticeably more expensive at KES 27,800.
