The reason I’m revisiting the Tecno M3 is due to its price. Most people have been asking me for a cool phone under 10k.

I used the Tecno M3 last year August between September and November when I still blogged at otienodickson.blogspot.com. I wrote this about the phone but had problems when migrating my blogger posts to this self-hosted WordPress blog. In the process, I happened to have lost some screenshots and images, stupid much of me, which I had attached to the post. That somewhat rendered the post disorganised and pretty much kinky-ish (that word doesn’t exist). Anyway, here’s Tecno M3 Revisited.

When I bought the phone on 6th September, it was priced at Ksh. 8500, I have the receipt. Its price has probably fallen now to around between 7000 and 8000 shillings. So if you’re a university student, or someone on a less-than-10k budget this should interest you. But if you’re targeting something between 10k and 20k, here’s the post for you.

Tecno M3 is a small phone. It has a 3.5 inch display, capacitive touchscreen. The actual dimensions are 115.3 x 61.2 x 11.9 mm meaning it isn’t a thin phone. It has HVGA resolution which stands at 320 x 480 pixels and while using it, you get all the colours correct. Indoors, the display is very good even at least brightness. You however need full brightness outdoors, but you can set auto-brightness to avoid the hustle of changing every time. That tells you there’s a light sensor just next to the front camera.

The front camera is 0.3MP. I took a selfie one of those good old days and it came out clear enough for me to have the confidence of posting it on Instagram. And it was on a single try. It isn’t wow. It is just normal but totally sucks when you’re in dim places.
The rear camera is 5MP with flash and can manage photos with resolutions of up to 2592×1944 pixels. It supports face and smile detection. You can also take High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos. Writing it in full makes it sound like a very awesome feature?

HDR, is a method of increasing the ratio of light to dark in a photograph. When taking a photo in HDR, your phone will split out one regular pic and another in HDR. The regular pic looks like a normal photo from a camera while the HDR photo looks like (or should look like) what your normal eyes would see. That’s a free lecture on HDR…

The phone comes pre-installed with over 20 Apps. I have listed some on the previous post so I’d rather not go in to that. You’ll get an 8GB Tecno Micro-SD card included free of charge when you buy the phone. This is something Tecno has been doing with all its phones. I however wonder if it has done the same with the Phantom Z.
The internal storage that is user accessible is 1.2GB which you only use as USB storage since your applications are installed in some free 1.7GB kind of partition. The RAM is 512MB and the processor is a dual-core Mediatek chipset clocked at 1GHz.

A dual core processor means you’ll enjoy running relatively huge applications without slowing down the phone. It will also not hang every time. You’ll have an almost smooth experience. I remember I installed Asphalt 8 on the phone and could play it without any troubles. Asphalt 8 by the way is 1.2GB. So you can see what I mean. But I remember I had to move so many apps to the SD card to create space. I also uninstalled some. Who cares anyway? I played the game!

The phone battery, 1400mAh, was quite something. I remember there was a day I was traveling. I uploaded 8 episodes of ‘Continuum Season 1’ to my SD card. I managed to watch 4 episodes and still remained with 47% battery. I however was on Airplane mode.
The phone’s battery will drain very fast on 3G networks. WiFi is your best bet to realising long hours on a single charge.

If you’re looking for a perfect Android experience at less than 10k, this phone is what I will always recommend. It runs on Android 4.2.2 something, no other company has offered to customers at that price range.

After reading the phone’s specifications, don’t you think it has, apart from the screen size, pretty much the same specifications as the Galaxy Trend? I don’t know. And I haven’t insinuated anything.