TECNO POVA 4 PRO
POVA is one of the most important lineups for Tecno to win over users who are ignored by most well-known brands. Even in the design, The POVA models are also more attentive than most brands’ budget phones. No exception for the latest POVA 4 Pro. As a budget phone, even though it doesn’t come with a high-performance chipset, it’s still special enough in its price range.
Design
The first thing that impressed me is the phone’s design. Especially the back cover has a geometric aesthetic, far smarter than some combination of rectangular and round arrangements. It makes the camera module less obtrusive and more compatible with the rest of the back cover. What’s even more interesting is that the camera module doesn’t bump up too much.
On the other hand, like most budget models, both the phone’s frame and back cover are made of plastic. But the built quality doesn’t feel cheap at all. Oddly enough, the plastic frame feels much like metal.
The POVA 4 Pro isn’t exactly thin and lightweight. But considering the 6000mAh huge battery, this seems like a fair deal. Yes, you heard it right, the POVA 4 Pro is equipped with a long-last 6000mAh battery. So, if you need a regular phone with long battery life, it’s definitely one of the best choices. After a full day of heavy testing work, the remaining-power figure seemed to mock us: is that all there is?
Display
The 6.6-inch 90Hz Oled 1080P notch display is the most attractive upgrade over the standard POVA 4. If you choose the standard version, all you can have for eyes is a 720P LCD panel. But on the Pro variant, you can have a much better color contrast with a higher resolution. Meanwhile, you can also turn the AOD feature on for standby mode. On this phone, the 90Hz is also an appropriate refresh rate to match the software with smooth animation.
Software
And the system of the POVA 4 Pro also offers a good response without obvious laggy issues. But it still might let me wait one or two seconds to get responses or get slightly stuck if I kept too many apps on standby in the background. In this case, the phone provides a shortcut on the home page. With one click, the phone can clean up the background and free up memory to restore system smoothness. The operating system running on the phone is HiOS, which is based on Android 12. It’s one of the most friendly OS for budget models that we’ve ever experienced. But meanwhile, almost all the features updated in Android 12 are ready on the POVA 4 Pro.
Another convenient feature for the camera is that Google Lens has been integrated into the camera app, which can be easily activated by clicking the shortcut at the corner of the camera UI.
Audio
A surprise is that the POVA 4 Pro comes with dual speaker units for playing stereo sounds. This is indeed out of our expectations. So here just judge for yourself how they sound.
There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack at the bottom, where you can also plug the headphone in and turn it into an FM radio antenna. Inside the phone box, the accessories also include a pair of wired headphones for users.
And on the left side, the Sim-card tray also gives us some surprises. Pull it out and you will see the waterproof rubber ring, which is good. And it can load dual sim cards and gives another TF slot on the other side for storage expansion, which is indeed the most generous I have ever seen.
Cameras
As for the camera, the POVA 4 Pro is equipped with an 8MP selfie camera and dual rear cameras. For the front one, Tecno also brought the flash that we saw on the Spark series. You can make it a flash for taking selfies or keep it on to fill in the light for video shooting. While for the rear cameras, the main camera features a surprising 50MP sensor but we have no idea what the second cam is used for. This is clearly a risky solution. It removes other secondary lenses but focuses on giving the primary lens the best experience possible. I did enjoy shooting photos on the POVA 4 Pro since the 50MP sensor did produce good images for us. The absence of a wide-angle lens indeed made us a bit uncomfortable at first, especially when taking landscape photos. But the fact is that most wide-angle lenses don’t take high-quality pictures. Not to mention that this is a reasonably priced phone. So it’s still a fair deal.
And thanks to the 50MP high resolution, the phone can shoot pretty good digital zooming photos, especially in the range from 1 to 3x. Also due to the nice algorithm tuning, the photos shot on the phone still have decent colors and good sharpness.
One more thing, the beauty effect of both the front and rear cameras is so amazing. It has a variety of beauty filters, not only for females but also for you guys. Even though I adopted a man filter, it still made me really feel shy after seeing the photos.
As for video shooting, both the front and rear lenses can shoot videos at up to 2k 30fps. This is indeed a bit of a waste of this 50MP sensor.
Performance & Gaming
As we mentioned, the Helio G99 is not exactly a high-performance chipset. But on phones like the POVA 4 Pro, such a configuration is still very reasonable. Meanwhile, the phone also generously comes with 8GB Ram plus 256GB Rom. This makes it capable of running most games smoothly under relatively low graphics.
For connectivity, in addition to Bluetooth and WIFI 5, the phone also supports NFC features.
The POVA 4 Pro’s battery life is really impressive. It’s pretty easy for the 6000mAh capacity to stand by for more than 2 days after we completed our battery life test. And then the 45W fast charger can collect all the power back in just about 1 hour, which is also not bad.
So that’s all we want to share about the Tecno POVA 4 Pro. We didn’t really expect a lot from this phone until we got it. And now we really appreciate the trade-offs that Tecno made with this phone. Tecno is still good at making budget phones. Unlike some brands, we can see from the POVA 4 Pro that the brand are serious.
