Tecno Pova 6 Pro 5G Review: Decent Budget Phone With A Few Important Wins

The Tecno Pova 6 Pro 5G provides a glimpse at smartphone innovation outside the dominant players in domestic Android phones. We often get glimpses of high-end phones from Xiaomi, Huawei, and Honor (like the Honor Magic 6 Pro, another recent release not headed to the U.S.), but less so of the more budget offerings from companies like Shenzhen-based Tecno Mobile.

While Tecno's slate of Android phones includes more budget models, the Pova 6 Pro 5G aims higher, with better components, a stylish design, and a more capable camera than most of its same-branded predecessors. While the Pova 6 Pro 5G appears to stand atop Tecno's line-up, the phone is described as "mid-range."

In my time evaluating the Pova 6 Pro 5G (provided by Tecno for this review) I was pleasantly surprised by the experience. It has a compelling design that punches far above its weight class and has features I wouldn't expect in a phone at the Pova's target price. But I also found the phone makes a few compromises, despite packing a lot of fine features into a capable package.

The Pova 6 Pro 5G has a striking design, with a stylish, glossy look that stands out from the crowd. The body has a plastic frame and back, but it has a sturdy build with no torque. The front cover glass has smooth finish, however Tecno makes no mention of a specific fingerprint-resistant coating, or of any specific cover glass fortifications.

While I wasn't bothered by an excess of visible fingerprints on the front, the plastic back was another story. The phone's back was like a fingerprint magnet, with distinctive marks left behind to complement the backplate's ridged designs. I found the device attracted debris easily as well, as you might notice in some of this review's images. The company describes the Pova 6 Pro 5G as its first using P-NCVM border technology, which smooths the middle frame of the device and enables the overall design.

Beneath the clear plastic chassis, you can see a stylish lithography pattern that evokes a futuristic appearance reminiscent of a circuit board. Tecno describes this system as an advanced Lithography Precision Technology Texture. The top third of the backplane contains an angular module that fits seamlessly with the phone's overall aesthetic and contains its three cameras and its dynamic Mini LED light strips.

The dynamic lighting at the back of the phone is eye-catching and highly configurable, but it's also somewhat gimmicky. It consists of 210 micro-LEDs that can play in a "dynamic eye" structure with 108 user-definable patterns and 9 pre-defined notification scenarios. 

I found this feature only useful for notifications (like an incoming call or message, or the battery is low) when I'd flipped the phone upside down on a surface, so the back was facing up so I could see the flashing lights. I did find the lights handy while transferring files via Bluetooth; the ongoing zig-zag of light on the back confirmed at a glance that the transfer remained in progress. Overall, the lights are a fun inclusion and a diversion, but they were less useful than you might expect — particularly while interacting with the device's front display.

The Pova 6 Pro 5G is slim, with a depth of just 7.9mm (making it 12.4% thinner than its predecessor). Despite its more budget price, that's comparable to the Apple iPhone 15 (7.8mm) and the Samsung Galaxy S24 (7.6mm). It's almost a millimeter thinner than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (8.6mm) — and it narrowly beats the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max at 8.3mm. Its overall footprint is 165.5mm x 76.1mm, a size I felt comfortable to use one-handed.

The right side of the chassis has distinct, responsive buttons for volume up and down, and a wider sleep/wake/power button further down the side. The SIM card slot on the left side of the phone supports dual nano SIMs. Along the bottom of the phone sits the USB-C port, a dedicated speaker (the phone's earpiece serves as a second speaker for stereo sound), and a 3.5mm headphone jack — bonus: Tecno includes a serviceable headset in the package.

The top edge has an IR blaster (for use with the IR remote in the Welife smart home app) and a microphone. The phone carries an IP53 certification for dust and light water resistance. Connectivity includes 5GHz W-iFi Bluetooth 5.3, NFC, and USB On The GO (OTG). It carries certification from TUV Rheinland for its blue light reduction.

The Pova 6 Pro 5G comes in Comet Green and Meteorite Gray. Tecno conveniently includes a case with a matching silicone border and a clear plastic backplate so you can still appreciate the lithography patterns and light patterns.

The Pova 6 Pro 5G comes with Tecno's HiOS 14 based on Android 14.5. The user interface is clean and easy on the eyes. Notably, it borrows a page from Apple's playbook and introduces a similar set of about a dozen pre-installed HiOS apps and standard Google apps.

Among Tecno's pre-installed apps are T-Spot, Visha Player, Mobile Cloner, Welife, Weather, My Health, and WOW FM. While Tecno prompts you to set up a Tecno account, you can use most of these apps without an account (T-Spot and the smart-home-themed Welife with infrared remote were the exceptions). Visha Player is a video player that supports Dolby Atmos. You also get the Hola browser, Hi Theme (for wallpapers), a notepad, a voice recorder, and access to the Palm app store.

Some of HiOS' apps appear to provide an alternative method of accessing info. For example, the Phone Master app was simply a shortcut to viewing the phone's status. 

Tecno suggests that "AI" comes into play in a few ways on this phone. For the camera app, AI works in the background to improve images. AI is also at play with Tecno's second-generation noise-reduction algorithm, designed to boost voice audio clarity on calls. The company has an AI Gallery app, but this appears to be no more than a standard on-device photo viewer with AI for finding images using a natural language search function.

An uncommon twist for the Pova 6 Pro 5G is that it is a mid-range phone with a host of entertainment features, including mobile gaming optimizations, Dolby Atmos, and support for HiRes Audio, including wireless high-resolution audio playback.

The phone has a 6.78-inch FHD+ AMOLED screen with 2,436 x 1,080-pixel resolution, 100% DCI-P3 wide color gamut, and a fast 120Hz refresh rate suitable for gaming. I found the screen's colors looked vibrant, with deep blacks and crisp edges.

For gaming, the Pova 6 Pro 5G has several optimizations. It can deliver in-game "4D vibrations" thanks to its Z-axis linear motor and gyroscope. The "4D Vibration Sense" feature is jointly certified by "PUBG" and Tencent Lab. And it has six control modes for use with e-sports gaming.

The handset has a new cooling system designed with gaming in mind. Dubbed the "Pova SuperCooled System 1.0," the phone uses a phase-change thermal gel, a heatsink, and graphite material that supports conducting 1,700 watts. I never experienced the phone overheating during gaming, but once, on a warm day, my camera use caused the phone to overheat.

Finally, Tecno includes its own Game Space 4.0 gaming control panel for scheduling GPU usage, touch control, and switching among three power modes depending on the type you're playing. Once you're in the game, the panel monitors the phone's RAM, ROM, GPU, CPU, network, power, and temperature conditions and sends alerts if usage exceeds safety parameters. You can unlock higher-frame-rate graphics if available for a specific game.

The Tecno Pova 6 Pro 5G comes with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and it has an 8-core MediaTek Dimensity 6080 processor inside. According to MediaTek, this chip uses its HyperEngine 3.0 Lite gaming technologies to provide smoother performance during gameplay.

Benchmarks tell another story, though. According to Geekbench 6.2.2, the Pova 6 Pro scored a lackluster 2,031 on the multi-core CPU test. To put that in perspective, Samsung's Galaxy Note 10 (a 2019 release) achieved about that, according to Geekbench's Android benchmarks history. And it fell somewhere between the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G (2022) and lesser than the Samsung Galaxy A54 5G (2023) — both sub-$500 phones in the U.S. market.

The graphics score was low as well, at 1,420 for GPU OpenCL score. By comparison, the Samsung Galaxy A53 scored more than double that, at 3,007.

So what do those numbers mean in reality? In use, I found the phone lacked the snappy feel of current-gen flagship and mid-range phones from Samsung, OnePlus, and Google. This manifested in labored transitions while using the YouTube app to flip through YouTube Shorts, stuttering in-game graphics, and a sluggish camera app when snapping a 108MP image or switching among settings. 

The battery life of the Pova 6 Pro lives up to its pro moniker, at least. The package includes a proprietary 70W fast USB charger that supports three charging modes. It takes 20 minutes to charge the phone by 50%, 50 minutes to get to 100%. While fast charging is always a useful feature to include, the Pova 6 Pro 5G's 6,000mAh battery lasted long enough that I rarely felt the need for a rapid top-up.

The Tecno Pova 6 Pro 5G has a 108 MP main camera with a 0.7μm sensor, a 2 MP depth sensor, and a 0.08 MP auxiliary lens. In addition to the standard set of shot modes, this device's camera app has some unusual features like Dual Video mode for capturing video with the rear camera and 32MP front camera simultaneously. It also has the gimmicky AR Shot (for adding a character graphic to your image, like replacing your head with an animal); and, it shows an icon on-screen when the AI detects a circumstance that requires automatic image enhancement (such as HDR, backlight, sky, and more).

The image quality was good overall, with accurate colors. I found it struggled more in low light, and I missed having additional optical zoom length (it went up to 10X using digital zoom). But with good lighting, the camera was very effective at capturing scenes.

I loved how easy it was to switch between the 12MP and 108MP sensors with a tap of a button, but the lag I experienced when I did so was not great. Snapping photos at full resolution can, potentially, make a big difference — if you're expanding your images to full size and zooming in. But as we came to understand over the past decade, megapixels aren't everything. For example, the Google Pixel 8 Pro has a 50MP camera array and takes far, far better photos – and the Pixel 7a's 64MP camera array is no slouch.

Introduced at Mobile World Congress in 2024, the Pova 6 Pro 5G was announced to be released in select Asian, South American, and African markets. The phone sells for around $269 on Amazon (approximately ₹21,999), depending on the market. The phone is not officially sold in the U.S., but you might see it at some point on eBay or via alternative retailers specializing in international phones. That price point makes sense given its positioning as a mid-range, since phones like Samsung's Galaxy S24 series and Apple's iPhone 15 series are among the priciest phones worldwide.

My experience of using the Tecno Pova 6 Pro 5G was generally positive, despite its low benchmarks and occasional lags. The phone still felt better to use than some low-cost handsets I've handled in the recent past. It has some thoughtful inclusions that separate it from some of the other lesser-known mid-range phones I've seen, including a 108MP camera, capacious battery, fast charging, and gaming features. I'd consider last year's Google Pixel 7a a step better, but that model's price is higher (though it hits $375 in the U.S. when on sale). Even so, the Pova 6 Pro 5G is a reasonable, perhaps even compelling, choice in some regions.

My biggest gripes were with the camera's sluggish shutter when capturing 108-megapixel images, and the occasional stutters in gameplay. But the camera output itself was satisfying, especially at 108MP, and I liked that the phone included a case and a stereo headset to go with the 3.5mm headphone jack. Overall, the Tecno Pova 6 Pro 5G hits a mark for those seeking something that works reasonably well, captures decent photos, and doesn't break the wallet.