The sub ₹10,000 category is one of the hottest segment in India with a sales surpassing through double-digit on YoY basis. Rising customer expectation and growing competition have impelled the smartphone manufacturers to cut margins but not corners. Amid this heated competition are some new names who hopes to get a piece of this action.
Infinix – a relatively new company recently launched their Hot 7 smartphone in India. A smartphone with good built quality, dual camera setup and a massive 4,000mAh battery. This device represents its successor Hot 6 and 6X with a new design and form factor.
It is this budget offering worth your consideration? Well, let’s find out.
Design and Display
As far as the design of Infinix Hot 7 goes, it resembles the Infinix Hot 7 Pro which was launched earlier this year. The phone comes with a visible yet bold notch upfront and a chin at the bottom. While the back comes with a dual rear camera setup beside a centre mounted fingerprint sensor. The design remains simplistic with its metal finish and emits a sense of confidence with its good built quality.
The 6.19 inch, IPS LCD HD+ display at the front comes with a 2.5D glass protection. The visuals of this screen are modest at best given its viewing angles and colour saturation. The 19.9:9 aspect ratio does try to provide that cinematic experience but the LCD simply fails to match the intended quality that is expected while streaming content.
Overall, the phone has a nice grip with slightly curved corners and edges, which is comfortable to carry around. It comes in three in Midnight Black, Aqua Blue, and Mocha Brown colours. We had the blue variant of the phone for review which looks elegant. The power and volume buttons are on the right side, while the SIM tray is on the left.
Camera
In terms of optics, the Infinix Hot 7 sports a dual-camera setup that includes a 13MP primary sensor paired with a 2MP secondary sensor.
Surprisingly, the camera performed well in the daylight conditions, as the images came out accurate and packed in the accurate colour gamut across the entire exposure range. The AI Beauty mode too worked well as it was able to recognize the subject within seconds. The company has included additional features such as PDAF, Dual LED Flash, AI Portrait, AI HDR, Night, Sports, Blue Sky, and Text.
The front-facing camera, on the other hand, comes with a similar setup of 13MP f/2.0 lens and a secondary 2MP depth sensor. However, this setup disappoints with its underrated visuals and dull contrasts.
Performance and Battery
The smartphone comes packed with 2.39GHz Octa-Core MediaTek Helio P25 SoC processor, coupled with up to 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage that is expandable via a dedicated microSD card.
This processor falls short of the competition in regards to what the competition has to offer. Despite this, the smartphone never felt to be underpowered in any sense. It seems the company has done their homework with the XOS 5.0 (Android 9.0) as it seems extremely polished and refined.
Gaming performance was mediocre as expected, the smartphone failed to maintain the visuals or the frame rate enough to make any demanding title playable. We recommend you to stick to casual games with this device as it was never meant to deliver that raw gaming performance.
What it loses out on performance, it makes it up in overall usefulness. The device justifies the tagline of a smartphone with its smart and useful ticks such as dedicated biking mode, smart camera features and other pre-installed apps.
Battery life is nothing out of the box as it delivers the claimed battery life of over 7 hours of intermittent use age. This 4000mAh battery can be easily topped up with the 10W brick provided in the box.
Gizmo Verdict
In terms of the competition, the Infinix Hot 7 is indeed “Hot” with its cool user-friendly features which no competition offers. The processor and the camera department could benefit from some additional updates and software patches is what we could tell. All considered, the Hot 7 is a great option given its price of ₹7,999 for 4GB+64GB storage option. It does tick all the right boxes and deserves its rightful place among the competition.
