Infinix Hot 6 Pro review: Adept budget phone with big screen, good battery

The Infinix Hot 6 Pro boasts a powerful 4,000 mAh battery, which lasts for around two days. However, charging times are not good and the phone takes more than two hours to go from 0-100%

Infinix, a smartphone brand owned by Hong Kong-based mobile phone manufacturer Transsion Holdings, on July 11 launched the Infinix Hot 6 Pro at Rs 7,999. The phone sports a 5.99-inch screen in 18:9 ratio, dual rear cameras and a 4,000 mAh battery, making it a solid proposition in an entry-level smartphone segment.

For a budget smartphone, the 5.99-inch HD+ resolution screen stretched in 18:9 aspect ratio looks optimal. It reduces the phone’s overall dimension, making it comfortable to hold and easy to operate. The screen is bright and there is no visible touch lag. The screen and touch calibration is also on spot, making it a budget device that feels like a mid-ranger. The screen supports eye care mode, which calibrates it to warm settings for extended on-screen usage without causing any discomfort to eyes.

Powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 quad core system-on-chip (SoC), paired with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory -- expandable up to 128 GB through microSD card – the phone runs smoothly and performs basic tasks like calls, messaging, casual browsing without hiccups. However, due to entry-level process with limited resources, the phone shows minor lags here and there, especially with processor intensive apps running in background.

The Hot 6 Pro comes loaded with Android 8.0 Oreo operating system out-of-the-box, based on Infinix’s Hummingbird XOS 3.2 system user interface (UI). The interface is smooth, but has a lot of bloatware pre-installed such as Flipkart, Carlcare, Facebook, Magic Movie, Palmstore and PHX Browser apps.

In terms of imaging, the Hot 6 Pro boasts a horizontally stacked dual-camera setup at the back with a 13-megapixel primary sensor, mated with a 2MP depth sensing lens. The rear cameras manages to take average-to-decent photographs in normal day light but struggles in low-light conditions. The in-build portrait mode, which uses depth sensing camera for enhanced bokeh effect, is not bad either and the portraits come out clean with good focus on object and proper focus and background segmentation.

The 5MP selfie camera on the front takes average shots with overexposed backgrounds at times and hazy focus even during day light conditions. At night, the front camera struggles to impress.

For device unlock, the phone sports fingerprint sensor on the back, which works fine. The phone also supports face-unlocking mechanism, which uses front camera to detect face to unlock the phone. The face unlock feature works fine under normal light, but tends to miss the face during low light. However, the phone features front flash that could be used in dark for front camera to recognise face and unlock the phone.

Powered by a 4,000 mAh battery, the phone last for around two days on a regular usage comprising of nearly two hours of gaming, one hour of social media (Facebook/Twitter/Instagram) and 1.5-2 hours of video streaming (Youtube/Amazon Prime videos/Sony Liv). However, the phone lacks rapid charging and takes around 3 hours to charge from 0-100%. The device supports dual-SIM and the SIM tray has the provision to accommodate two SIMs and a microSD card simultaneously.

Infinix Hot 6 Pro

 

Verdict

Priced at Rs 7,999, the Infinix Hot 6 Pro is a decent budget smartphone with satisfactory performance. The phone’s camera and battery charging speed could have been better. Yet, for an entry-level smartphone, the device ticks most of the right boxes to compete with Xiaomi, Infocus, iVoomi and Honor smartphones in the same segment.