Only a few weeks after Tecno offered a morsel of what’s to come at Comic Con, the company is finally ready to properly unleash the Tecno Pova 7 Series onto unsuspecting South Africans. We have, unfortunately, missed out on the most capable sibling, the Pova 7 Ultimate, but the devices we do have — the Pova 7 and Pova 7 Pro 5G — are more than up to the job of servicing the country’s upper mid-range market at an actually affordable price.
The arrival of the Pova 7 Series is a first for Tecno SA, which is typically associated with extremely budget smartphones. It isn’t ditching its roots, however. At a launch event today in Johannesburg, Tecno took the opportunity to also debut the Spark 40 Series, which, thankfully, remains firmly under the R10k mark.
Is Nothing sacred?
The Pova 7 Series immediately caught our eye — not because of the affordable price tag (though that certainly helped) — but rather because of Tecno’s design philosophy. We won’t be the first (nor the last) to point out that Tecno has, uh, borrowed Nothing’s whole flow, introducing a dynamic glyph interface around the camera bump that’ll react to whatever you throw its way, whether that be notifications, widgets, or even the volume slider.
That’s not a bad thing, especially at these prices. It may not be entirely original, but Tecno has at least eschewed the plain ol’ mid-range smartphone look for something that stands out in the crowd. Where Nothing upped the premium factor with a glass rear, Tecno’s kept it simple (and cost-effective) with a plastic rear and visible screws.
Both devices feature a 6.78in display, though the Pro outdoes its younger sibling with an AMOLED 144Hz refresh rate and 1.5K resolution. The regular Pova 7 makes do with an IPS FHD+ screen that’ll also hit 144Hz. You’re getting a ‘Status Light’ as Tecno calls it, on both devices — so you won’t have to make any hard decisions when it comes down to it.
Read More: Tecno’s hyper-affordable Spark Go 2S lands in SA priced at R1,400
With a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Ultimate SoC (System on a Chip) and 8GB of physical memory at the heart of both the Pova 7 and Pova 7 Pro, you can likely expect decent performance from both these devices. A 6,000mAh battery keeps them floating along for hours at a time, bolstered by 45W wired charging and 30W wireless.
Whether the 64MP and 8MP ultrawide shooters found on the Pro are good enough for social media remains to be seen. Still, it does beat out the base Pova 7, which rocks up to the party with a singular 50MP shooter on the rear. Either way, the two devices share a 13MP selfie camera found on their fronts.
While we’ve yet to find any official listings for both the Tecno Pova 7 5G and Pova 7 Pro 5G, the company reckons they’ll be available from Vodacom “in the coming weeks” with a RRP of R11,000 and R13,000, respectively. The Tecno website lists the former as featuring up to 256GB of storage, though with an option to drop that down to 128GB. Pro buyers appear to be locked in at 256GB, with no option to downgrade and save a couple of bucks.
