Foldable phones are still a long way off from being considered as mainstream smartphones, and for good reason — they’re either too expensive or there’s a perception that these handsets aren’t durable enough to last more than a couple of years. However, the quality of folding screens has improved considerably over the past few years, while foldable phones are slowly becoming more accessible in terms of pricing. Earlier this year, Motorola launched the Razr 40 that was priced under the Rs. 60,000 mark, and Tecno followed suit with the Phantom V Flip. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks using the Tecno Phantom V Flip and here are my thoughts on the company’s latest clamshell-style folding phone.

Tecno Phantom V Flip price in India

Tecno has set the price of the Phantom V Flip in India at Rs. 54,999 — the early bird pricing was only for a month after the phone was launched — and you get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of inbuilt storage. It’s available in Iconic Black and Mystic Dawn colourways.

Tecno Phantom V Flip design

The Tecno Phantom V Flip is a thin smartphone when unfolded, and that’s a good thing because it results in a compact form factor when you fold it shut. It has a vegan leather exterior that offers a good grip. The inner screen has a crease that’s slightly visible on dark wallpapers and when the screen is off, but it’s barely perceptible when you’re using the phone. If you hold the phone at specific angles when the screen is on, you might notice the crease, and you can definitely feel it when you’re scrolling inside apps.

Tecno says that its drop-shaped hinge used for the foldable display mechanism has a ‘Hoverlock’ design that allows you to keep the phone open between 30 degrees and 150 degrees. There’s no gap between the two halves of the display when it is closed. The Phantom V Flip has a circular cover display that is reminiscent of a smartwatch display, and it is surrounded by two cameras.

The Tecno Phantom V Flip sports a 6.9-inch flexible AMOLED screen

There’s a fingerprint scanner that’s positioned on the right side of the phone and it’s easy to reach with one hand. There’s a bit of resistance when trying to open the phone — no complaints here because it seems to let the phone remain steady when bent at different angles — I ended up using both hands to unfold the phone. There’s no IP rating here, so you’ll need to be careful of splashes and dust around the smartphone.

Tecno Phantom V Flip specifications and features

The Phantom V Flip is powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 8050 chip paired with an Arm Mali-G77 GPU, along with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM. This is a capable mobile processor, and there’s plenty of memory to run several applications at the same time. If you want to, the phone can utilise some of the unused 256GB of UFS 2.1 inbuilt storage (up to 16GB) for even more demanding tasks.

It ships with HiOS 13.5 — Tecno’s custom interface that runs on top of Android 13 — out of the box. The company has promised to provide two years of OS updates and three years of security updates for the Tecno Phantom V Flip. The phone ships with a few preinstalled apps including WPS Office, Phone Master, Facebook, Mobile Cloner, Visha Player, Spotify, Carlcare, and Instagram. It also comes with a ‘Sharp News‘ that curates news stories and links to content from the Internet.

In day-to-day usage, HiOS is quite smooth and multitasking between apps is quite easy — due to its narrow width, I found it easier to swipe and navigate across the interface. You can uninstall most of the bloatware listed above, except the Phone Master app. The quick settings menu took a short while to get used to, but offers enough toggles and settings that I didn’t have to open the Settings app to make changes. Its a little difficult to find some options in the Settings app, as they’re tucked away in sub-menus. For instance, if you want to look at per-app battery usage, you have to tap on Battery Lab > Battery Setting > Battery Usage.

Apps adapt when the inner display of the Phantom V Flip is partially folded

Tecno has equipped the phone with some multitasking gestures that lets you pop out a window from full screen mode and use it in floating window form. It also offers an app cloning feature if you need two copies of specific social media apps, some game mode enhancements, and other software optimisations sprinkled throughout the operating system.

Tecno Phantom V Flip performance

In the synthetic benchmarks tests, the Tecno Phantom V Flip managed decent scores, suggesting the Dimensity 8050 chip has enough performance overhead to remain smooth and competitive for the next couple of years. The phone scored 706,648 points in AnTuTu’s benchmark test, while its Geekbench 6 single-core and multi-core scores were 1,106 and 3,220 points, respectively. In the PCMark Work 3.0 test, the phone scored 14,392 points.

The Phantom V Flip is capable of handling most graphics intensive games, including Fortnite and Genshin Impact. I turned on the higher resolution “HD textures” feature on Fortnite and toggled the highest settings — 30 minutes in, the phone was slightly warm around the camera module, but it didn’t appear to have a major effect on gameplay. In Genshin Impact, I was able to play the game on ‘Medium’ settings without any issues — even in very hectic domains.

The handset packs a 4,000mAh battery that can be charged at 45W with the included charging brick. Within 30 minutes, the phone was charged from zero to 63 percent, while it was nearly full at 95 percent after another 30 minutes. It offers reliable battery life — 14 hours and 27 minutes in our video loop test. I was able to get through the day with about 30 percent of battery, with about 30 minutes of gaming and a general mix of watching videos on YouTube, texting on WhatsApp, and scrolling through X (formerly known as Twitter) and Threads.

The inner display on the Phantom V Flip offers decent visibility in bright sunlight

On the inside, the Phantom V Flip sports a 6.9-inch flexible AMOLED inner display with a full-HD+ resolution and up to 120Hz refresh rate. It’s very smooth and gets bright, especially when you’re outdoors — if you enable the High Brightness Mode in the display settings. Content looks good on the inner display in several apps and the phone supports HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG codecs. Apps work quite well in split-screen mode, and the built-in camera and YouTube.

There’s a circular 1.32-inch cover panel on the outside that looks similar to a round smartwatch screen. It’s definitely not as bright as the inner screen and you can use it to access apps that you download from the Play Store. What you do get is access to your events, a preview of the rear cameras (that are located around the circular display), fitness tracking information, upcoming alarms, the weather, sound recorder, a timer, and a stopwatch. Swiping down shows you a few quick toggles, while swiping up lets you see a list of your notifications.

Tecno Phantom V Flip cameras

The Phantom V Flip is equipped with a 64-megapixel primary camera and a 13-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera. You can also take selfies with a front-facing (when unfolded) 32-megapixel camera housed in a centre-aligned hole-punch cutout.

Tecno Phantom V Flip main and wide-angle camera samples (tap to see full size)

Images captured using the primary camera are crisp and sharp, especially when you enable the “64MP” mode that enables pixel-binning for shots — and takes a split second longer to save the image. During the day, you get a lot of detail and colours were accurate. When you switch to the wide-angle camera during the day, there’s a noticeable drop in quality, especially when it comes to exposure and colour accuracy.

The smartphone also takes good photos at dusk when lighting conditions are less favourable, capturing ample detail without adding too much noise. I found myself disabling the AI features on the camera for better results, but your mileage may vary. In dark scenarios, the Super Night mode works very well on the primary camera and captured enough detail within seconds.

While you can take selfies with the 32-megapixel camera on the inner display, the dual-display design of the Phantom V Flip allows you to click a photo of yourself using the 64-megapixel rear camera while using the cover display to preview your shot. The outer camera captures sharper images and you can also use features like Super Night mode when clicking photos of yourself in places without enough lighting.

Tecno Phantom V Flip main and wide-angle camera samples (tap to see full size)

You can shoot up to 4K videos at 30fps with the primary camera on the Tecno Phantom V Flip — and this is the only camera worth recording videos with. However, when shooting in low-light conditions, it is better to switch to 1080p at 60fps, but it will still appear dark and noisy — a far cry from the performance of the Super Night mode for still photos.   

Verdict

The Tecno Phantom V Flip brings foldable phones to a more affordable price point, but it makes some compromises along the way. For example, unlike its more expensive counterparts, you don’t get a larger external display that can run apps or even games, like the Moto Razr 40 Ultra — this phone’s outer screen is similar in size to the Moto Razr 40, which is also priced similarly. Similarly, the primary camera is the only one I enjoyed using on the Phantom V Flip, to the point where I was also using it to capture selfies.

The display on the Tecno Phantom V Flip is fluid and responsive and apps load smoothly thanks to the capable MediaTek processor and the 120Hz refresh rate. Battery life is also quite reliable and the 45W wired charging is useful to have — it is faster than the Galaxy Z Flip 5 which supports 25W charging via a PPS charger. If you don’t mind some of the caveats mentioned above, you can consider the Phantom V Flip if you’re looking for a foldable phone under the Rs. 60,000 mark.