Infinix Zero 5: Good cameras, long battery and powerful CPU but Big in size

Infinix is one of those Chinese manufacturers which have risen and made their place in global market within a very short span of time. People are now turning towards relatively newer players in the smartphone industry like Infinix, Xiaomi and Oppo who are providing great smartphones in very tight price ranges. As far as Infinix is concerned, it launched in Pakistan a few years ago. The company has been offering smartphones in different ranges and the smartphones offered in the Zero series are its flagship ones.

The company recently held a Global Launch event for its next flagship device, Infinix Zero 5, in Dubai. To help our readers, TechJuice has come up with a detailed review on this smartphone. So, without any further ado, let us dive into the writeup given below and see if this smartphone really does justice to what we have been expecting.

Specifications

Before getting on with the original review, let us first see what specifications does this smartphone offer.

The smartphone comes with:

• A 5.98 inches full-HD screen, protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3
• 6GBs of RAM and 64GBs of internal storage (internal storage can be expanded up to 128 GB using a microSD card)
• A MediaTek Helio P25, an octa-core processor with 4 cores @ 2.4GHz and the other 4 @ 1.7GHz
• A Dual Camera setup at the rear. The setup contains a 12MP f/2.0 wide-angle camera and a 13MP 2x telephoto camera
• 16 MP f/2.0 front shooter
• Android 7.0 Nougat
• Non-removable 4350mAh Li-Ion battery with fast charging capability

Pros and cons

Now, coming on to the good and the bad of this smartphone. As far as the merits of this smartphone are concerned, Infinix Zero 5 smartphone boasts

• An impressive camera
• You get great internals, especially the 6 Gigs of RAM and a decent 8-core processor
• Vivid cinematic display
• Great battery life, with fast charging as the cherry on top

In addition to these perks, there are some demerits to this smartphone too. If you are looking to buy this smartphone, these might be some of the issues that may force you into thinking twice:

• Significant bezels along with the big screen can make this smartphone difficult to handle
• Software experience is not well optimized
• Absence of non-removable battery (It has been a long long time since smartphones have stopped coming with removable battery)

What do you get in the box?

The smartphone comes in a black premium-looking packaging. As you open the box, you are greeted with the big-screened smartphone itself. Apart from that, here is a list of things that you get.

• A 5-9V/2A, 9-12V/1.5A fast charging wall adapter
• A USB Type-C cable along with a microUSB to Type C connector
• A 3.5 mm wired hands-free
• A slot ejector pin for SIM and the memory card trays
• A warranty card and a quick-start user manual
• A transparent plastic protective case

It should be noted that you might not necessarily get the same equipment as this also depends upon the region of your purchase and may differ from country to country.

We will now be diving into the in-depth review of this smartphone.

Design and build quality

The first department on this smartphone that we would be reviewing is its design and build. And this brings us to one of the major demerits that this smartphone has with it — the significant bezels on top and below. With about 6 inches of large screen and those huge bezels, Infinix Zero 5 is quite a large sized phone. The smartphone measures 166.38 x 82.38 x 7.95 mm in size, which means that you won’t be able to easily fit this into your jeans’ pockets. The smartphone lacks the 18:9 aspect ratio that we have most recently started seeing with bezel-less phones like Sasmung S8 LG G6, which makes it a little bit more difficult to handle.

Apart from that, Infinix has tried to make this smartphone look as premium as it could. The smartphone comes with a good-looking Metal unibody design. With a shiny metallic back and a minimalistic front, the smartphone looks great in all the three available color options that are the Champagne Gold, Bordeaux Red and Sandstone Black.

The back side of the smartphone looks luxurious. On the top, you can see a black strip like the one we saw with Nexus 6P, and more recently with the P9. The strip is being used to house the camera section which includes a prominent flashlight and two lenses. With the Infinix logo imprinted below, the manufacturer has placed the fingerprint sensor a bit below this black strip and your index finger will be able to easily reach it on the first try.

The front of the smartphone is simple. The top side of the smartphone holds a speaker grill, along with a 16MP selfie camera, a flash and a light sensor towards its left. There is also a small notification LED which isn’t noticeable when not in use. The Back, Home and Recent Application options have been added on the display and there aren’t any company-related branding.

There is a USB-C port, a speaker grill and a 3.5mm jack at the bottom of the device.

The right side of the smartphone houses a volume rocker along with a power button. In my opinion, these buttons could have been placed a bit higher so that they could be more comfortably pressed. The dual-SIM slots are placed above these buttons and the tray can be pulled out using the tray ejector tool provided with the box.

On the left, you get a microSD slot and the tray can be pulled out using the tray ejector tool provided with the box.

Round up: The smartphone boasts a pretty solid build and good design, however, the size of this smartphone is larger than usual and handling can be an issue.

Display

The smartphone has Full HD LTPS cinematic display, spanning over 5.98 inches. As far as the quality of display is concerned, it is a slightly above average panel. The automatic brightness adjustment is good and the contrast ratio is also fine at 500 nits. Even in direct sunlight, the brightness was adequate and it didn’t put any strain on my eyes. The viewing angles are excellent and would even surprise you when compared with the the most recent flagships that come with AMOLED and IPS displays.

I watched some high quality movies on this smartphone and was presented with a very pleasant watching experience on the large display. It wasn’t spectacular, but it wasn’t bad either. One good thing about the display is that it comes protected with Corning Guerrilla Glass 3, which provides an extra protection against scuffs and scratches. The glass is also curved at 2.5D, which helps greatly while swiping through the interface. These are some of the rare perks that you don’t usually find in mid-rangers.

Round up: Although not top-of-the-line, Infinix Zero 5 offers a decent display for its price range. You also get some extra peace of mind with the accompanying Corning Guerrilla Glass protection.

Software experience

As far as my software experience with this device is concerned, the smartphone comes with a few hiccups here and there. Infinix Zero 5 runs Android 7.0 Nougat with XOS 3.0 Hummingbird as a skin and you won’t find much room for customization in there. The smartphone comes preloaded with a lot of OEM applications like XShare, XCloud, Palmchat, and Palmstore, some of which can be disabled while some cannot be. So, if you are a stock Android fan, this might not be your cup of tea. Of the total 64GB of internal storage, the operating system takes about 10GBs and the rest can be used by the user.

Apart from that, the settings in this smartphone are also pretty basic and you won’t be able to make huge changes to the interface. There is a notification manager which can let you manually stop an application from sending you notifications but I still miss my last phone which gave me much advanced options like allowing an application to show notification on the bar but not on the drop-down notification area. The smartphone manager application also doesn’t offer a lot of utilities and you might have to resort to other third-party alternatives.

On the good side, the operating system comes with some unique features as well. The smartphone has a built-in Google Assistant, which will more often then not just put your query into the Google search box. Notification bar looks clean. Infinix has also added a Quick-start guide in the smartphone and it can help you on runtime, if you ever need it. There are inbuilt options for screen recording and scroll shots. Because of the large screen and plenty of RAM, the split screen option to open multiple applications on one screen is quite a delight to use.

Round up: Although the skin on this smartphone will suffice for general usage but the professional Android users will definitely look for a lot more optimizations.

Performance

Zero 5 is powered by a MediaTek Helio P25 chipset, which has an eight-core processor with its cores running at a maximum of 2.4 GHz. The graphics related processing is handled by a Mali-T880 GPU. As these processing cores are supported by a massive 6GB of RAM, you won’t experience any lag or any other performance-related issues in daily usage as well as when using big applications. The Helio processor makes a decent standing especially in its multi-core performance and you can easily open multiple applications and jump from one to other.

Infinix Zero 5 is most certainly a mid-ranger smartphone with good processing power. You can easily play majority of high resolution games on this smartphone. Different benchmarks done by different third-party applications tally this.

The Antutu Benchmarking

Round Up: The smartphone has one of the best mid-range processors.

Battery life

Another major advantage of buying this smartphone is its massive battery. Infinix Zero 5 comes with a massive battery of 4350mAh and the smartphone easily lasts two days on a full recharge. Moreover, the smartphone also boasts fast charging capabilities. Powered by XCharge, the charger can charge your smartphone from just below 10% to full in under 2 hours. Considering the huge size of the battery, this time is actually pretty impressive for any phone being charged through a USB Type C cable. The screen time mostly hovers around 10 hours (Disclaimer: Screen on time mostly depends on the type of usage, so your mileage way vary depending on how you intend to use this phone).

Round Up: In this price range, the battery department on this smartphone is certainly one of the best that you can get.

Camera

Usually, when designing phones for this price range, good quality cameras are not at the top of the list for most manufacturers. However, this time around, Infinix has tried to put in every possible effort to perfect the camera experience on their smartphone and they heavily marketed the new and improved sensor on this device. So, naturally, we all had high hopes for this smartphone.

Infinix Zero 5 features dual cameras at the back and a 16MP lens at the front. The rear setup consists of a standard 12MP wide-angle Sony IMX386, along with a 13MP tele-photo Samsung S5K3M3. With the help of these cameras, the smartphone was able to capture some really stunning shots, especially during the day time when a lot of ambient light was available.

Infinix calls Zero 5 as a “Portrait Expert because of the secondary tele-photo lens that has been added solely for snapping quality bokeh shots. The smartphone also offers focal lens setting even after you have taken the photo so one can manually set the level of bokeh as per one’s own liking. A bokeh-like effect is provided on the selfie camera too.

The Telephoto lens does a great job at providing the Bokeh effect, outdoors as well as indoors.

As far as the night time photography of this smartphone is concerned, the smartphone was able to get good photos where you had some lighting while in settings involving dark scenes, the smartphone did under-perform a lot. This could be possibly because of some fault in the software calibration and settings on this smartphone. The cameras add a lot of grain in conditions where darkness levels are higher, which points towards a lack of better post-processing algorithms used by Infinix in their camera software.

Snappy low-light photo where darkness levels are higher and light sources are afar

Low-light photo where darkness levels are not as high

However, the smartphone offers manual photography settings and one can reduce the ISO setting on the smartphone and take full advantage of the camera.

Low light photo taken in professional mode. You can see that the darkness levels are high but you don’t see much grains because of manual settings.

The smartphone can support a maximum of 1080p resolution for video recording. The smartphone doesn’t support any form of hardware or software stabilization engine. As a result the videos turn out to be a bit shaky, especially if you are walking or moving the device around a lot.

Round Up: The daylight photos mostly turn out great, the front and rear bokeh effects also work seamlessly. Night time photos will give issues in auto settings but can be set using the options given on the professional mode.

Conclusion

Infinix has tried to make Zero 5 as perfect as it could while keeping the price as low as possible. The smartphone checks most of the boxes but has a couple of let downs as well.

On the good side, Infinix Zero 5 will give you a real premium feel in hand with good build quality. It will give you a decent display, an enormous battery and decent CPU performance as well. However, as this smartphone is indeed is a huge phablet with broad bezels so handling could be an issue. Night time photography is another demerit but the professional mode is great and you will generally be able to cut the unwanted noise. Infinix has also promised one year of free Android upgrades, so there is a chance that we might get better OS optimizations for the night time photography in some subsequent upgrades.

Although the pricing for Infinix Zero 5 in Pakistan hasn’t been announced as of yet, this smartphone is expected to be placed in the upper mid-range category, with a price lying between 25,000-30,000 Rupees.

So, who is it for?
If you like big smartphones having large displays, good cameras and awesome battery lives, this is one of the best smartphones that you can get in this price range.

Stay update with the price and check out complete specifications of this smartphone from here.

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