In the past few months, Infinix has defined itself as a capable company that can deliver a promising breed of smartphones that can easily take the competitors head-on. Their latest sub-₹10,000 addition, the Infinix Hot 8 aims to disrupt the market with its 6.5-inch notched screen and 5000mAh battery & a triple camera setup at a jaw-breaking ₹6,999. So how exactly does the company’s new Hot 8 fair in its segment let`s find out!
Design & Display
The new Hot 8 certainly looks impressive with its notch drop display and a minimalist back. It’s entirely made out of plastic with a certain flamboyant texture added to highlight the rather drab looking back. The four-colour options include Quetzal Cyan, Shark Grey, Midnight Black and a Cosmic purple which all feels interesting. The side offers a sim card tray which has independent slots for two sim cards and a micro-SD card slot. However, there is a downfall that comes through the fingerprint attracting materials which picks up smudges rather easily. Despite this, the device in all is easy to handle and fits perfectly in the hand.
The 6.5-inch screen with an aspect ratio of 20:9 is something a lot of users will love. The device achieves this feat through a screen-to-body ratio of over 90.3 per cent. The colour reproduction is decent for the given price point & is something that no competitor comes close. The panel can max a brightness level of 450 nits with an option to change the colour temperature & colour saturation levels as per your peculiar liking.
Performance & Software
The smartphone derives its power from a MediaTek Helio P22 chipset coupled with a 4GB RAM and 64GB of storage which can be further expanded via a microSD card slot. This particular setup renders a decent performance that is more than capable enough to handle every task with ease. However, the load time suffers a bit when tasked with intensive apps which require some background activities to be completed in the meantime. It played titles like Subway Surfers, Candy Crush and Dr.Driving 2 pretty smoothly without breaking a sweat. Heavy titles, on the other hand, were suffering from a lot of drops in framerates at medium settings but were playable at lowest settings. Fortunately, there were no signs of visible heating that we encountered during our entire length of testing.
The operating system on the Hot 8 is the company’s own XOS 5.0 which is overlaid on top of Android 9.0 Pie. This OS comes preloaded with a lot of useless bloatware apps such as PHX browser, PalmStore, Opera Browser and ShareChat which thankfully can be cleared without any hitch.
We liked the addition of some useful features like smart panel which provides the list of most used apps anytime you want. There is also a dedicated Bike mode which makes answering text easier than ever, a Freezer app to stop all app notifications and a whole lot of gestures to choose from.
Camera performance
The Hot 8 offers a 13-megapixel primary sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and phase detection autofocus (PDAF), a 2-megapixel secondary sensor for depth sensing and a dedicated low-light sensor. This AI-backed camera setup lends support for modes like Beauty, Bokeh, Panorama, AR Shot, etc.
The images captured under sufficient daylight were quite good and consistent enough. It provided decent colour reproduction but lacked the flair that came with the perfect saturation. With the falling light, the camera’s performance fell drastically as the images started getting grainy with a lot of underlying noise to it. HDR mode didn’t help either as it always ended up overexposing the transient shots we took in the background.
Low light photos with the qual-LED flash helped the sensor pick up all the details in the given image and made the colours more pronounced in the final result. Bokeh mode failed in edge detection for certain areas of the object but did a splendid job nevertheless.
Selfies are good and could be used without a filer on social media. The images captured in daylight had all the details and sharpness we were looking for. Moreover, the beautification mode helps you get rid of all the minor blemishes and skin toning but looks quite artificial.
Battery
One of the strongest points of the Hot 8 comes through its gigantic 5000mAh battery which was able to max out a usage time equivalent to 2 days’ worth of backup. This use involves a fair bit of gaming, messaging, calling and some binge-watching. However, the lack of fast charging support means the device has taken a considerable time to top up the battery from scratch.
Gizmo Verdict
Given the price point, the long-lasting battery, a gigantic 6.5-inch HD+ display and a 64GB storage are all that you need. The device ticks all the right boxes with additional bits that are an outright segment first. So, for an average person looking for a big-screen smartphone that doesn’t frequently require hooking up to a charging adapter, the Infinix Hot 8 at ₹6,999 is an absolute steal.
