Dummy camera lenses are useless, but this phone gives them a cool purpose

• The Tecno Pova 8 looks like a triple-camera phone, but it actually has just one real camera: a 50MP Sony LYT-600 sensor.
• The “extra lens” isn’t a camera at all, but an Alive Matrix Display: a small LED panel that shows notifications, animations, and gaming effects.
• Beyond the camera gimmick, it packs an 8,000mAh battery with 45W charging, a Dimensity 7100 chip, and a 144Hz display running Hi OS 16 on Android 16.

We’ve seen phones from Xiaomi with secondary displays on the back, and Nothing has experimented with the Glyph Matrix on the Nothing Phone (4a) Pro. But it’s not every day you come across a phone whose camera array looks packed with lenses, only to find most of them aren’t cameras at all.

Tecno’s Pova 8 is exactly one of those phones that makes you stop for a second, stare at the back panel, and try to make sense of what you’re actually looking at. From a distance, it looks like a pretty standard triple-camera setup — you get the familiar triangular layout. But get closer, and the illusion starts to fall apart, because only one of those cameras is real.