A huge Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 competitor will launch during MWC

This week the phone focus has been all about Samsung, with the Samsung Galaxy S24 launch and the news that Samsung AI features would also be coming to existing devices such as the Galaxy Z Fold 5. But one of the most interesting phones we've seen this week could be one from a firm you might not have heard of: Tecno.

Tecno has been doing some interesting things with smartphones: in September it showed off a rollable phone that could expand from the size of a normal Android phone to a tablet-esque 7.11 inches. And now it has a new folding phone to take on the Galaxy Flip and Fold. 

The new phone is the successor to its Phantom V Fold foldable phone, and while it hasn't officially been announced yet its details have turned up on the benchmarking site Geekbench as well as in regulatory filings, which is usually a sign of imminent release.

From what we can see, it looks like this could be one of the most affordable folding phones around: the current model is cheaper than both the Galaxy Z Flip 4 and the Oppo Find N2 Flip. So will cheap make you cheerful?

Techno Phantom V Fold 2: key specifications

Where the Galaxy Z Fold 5 has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, the Tecno appears to be using the same MediaTek Dimensity 9000+ chipset as its current model. That's a 1.8GHz octa-core processor with four 1.8GHz cores, three 2.85GHz ones and a primary 3.2GHz core. Performance-wise that means it's likely to come in somewhere behind the Galaxy: where the Z Fold 5 gets a Geekbench score of 1,945 in single core and 5,111 in multi-core, the Tecno has 1,273 and 3,844. That puts it behind the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 and slightly ahead of the Galaxy Z Flip 3.

According to MySmartPrice.com, which has pulled the various listings and filings together, it's going to be an Android 14 device with 12GB of on-board RAM. Other details have yet to emerge but the current model has a 50MP three-camera setup, a 16MP selfie shooter, a 32MP camera on the cover, 128 or 256GB of storage and twin AMOLED displays: one 7.85-inch foldable and one external 6.42-inch.

What we don't know yet is when and where this phone will launch. The Phantom V Fold went on sale in India last year and it's unclear which territories its successor will be sold in; it was first shown off at last year's MWC trade show, so if history is repeating then we should see the official unveiling at this year's show in late February. That ties in with a GSM China report predicting a launch in the first quarter of 2024.