Infinix S5 Pro review: Budget device hidden inside a flagship design | Technology News,The Indian Express

Posted on March 31, 2020 by Design in Design Innovation | 0 Comments

Written by Karanveer Singh Arora
| New Delhi |

Published: March 27, 2020 7:35:22 am

The Infinix brand typically caters to those users who cannot afford to spend too much on their smartphones, and tries to offer specifications found in the Rs 15,000 and above price bracket at lower prices. Infinix, which is part of the Transsion brand, has announced its latest S5 Pro. Priced at Rs 9,999, the S5 Pro comes with a motorised pop-up sensor and a full-screen display. All of these features might not sound new, but for this price segment, one does not see them being offered by any manufacturer. Here’s our review of the phone.

Infinix S5 Pro Price: Rs 9,999 (4GB RAM/64GB storage)

What could make you buy it?

Design

The Infinix S5 Pro reminds me of the Vivo V15 Pro, which currently sells for around Rs 20,000. And that is not a bad thing, as its design looks modern and the phone definitely feels quite premium. I quite liked the forest green colour, though not everyone in my office preferred this. It has a plastic body, a bezel-less display along with a motorised pop-up selfie camera module, and this is impressive for the price.

It comes with dual SIM card support along with a dedicated microSD card slot for expanding the memory, which provides users with more flexibility than a usual hybrid SIM card slot.

Display

The Infinix S5 Pro sports a 6.53-inch full-screen display, which at this price point is a feature you will rarely find. Overall, the display shows punchy and saturated colours, which could be a good thing for people who like eye-popping colours.

Brightness is an area where I struggled a bit as I had to shield the screen with my hands at multiple times whenever I took it out under the bright sun. Performance indoors was apt and I did not face any obstacles while using it. The fact that the brightness can go quite low was a plus point for me to play games as night with the lights turned off.

Software

The device runs Android 10 operating system with its own XOS 6.0 skin on top, which is heavily customised. To me, this overly customised skin looks quite immature. But one thing that I liked about this operating system is that, just like OnePlus’ OxygenOS skin, it comes with a number of useful cards hidden away on the left most screen. Infinix has provided its users with an app drawer, which makes finding and sorting apps much easier.

Infinix S5 Pro comes with a triple camera setup on paper. However, keep in mind that you will only be able to use the 48MP primary sensor to take photos. As the second sensor is a 2MP depth sensor and the third sensor is a QVGA sensor, which is being used for low-light photography.

Coming to the images taken in good lighting conditions. They came out with a fair amount of details and accurate colours. The contrast of the images was good, so was the dynamic range. I preferred taking photos in the 12MP mode as they had more details and were sharper.

The motorised pop-up camera at the front does not perform as well as the rear camera. The company has promised a life span of 1,50,000 retractions and the device also comes with automatic retraction on accidental drops. However, when I tested this out, I found that the camera went in quite slow, which could mean that it could get damaged during a fall as it did not completely retract.

The phone’s Mediatek Helio P35 is able to handle a lot of stuff that a normal user will throw at it. Whether it be accessing social media, making calls or playing a few games. But keep in mind, I am not recommending that you go and start multi-tasking five heavy games at once. It is a sub-10,000 smartphone, and under that price-point, you should understand that the performance it will deliver is not the smoothest.

During daily usage, the phone worked perfectly fine, with it showing a few lags here and there when I went into power multi-tasking mode. However, while working with the phone, with just one or two apps open, a game and a small video on YouTube, it works completely fine.

Games like Crossy Chicken, Subway Surfers and Cooking Diary worked perfectly fine. PUBG Mobile gave some trouble in the beginning, but after the initial hiccup, I managed to play the game with no lags or stutters, which is impressive. When I played PUBG Mobile in high-resolution mode, the phone did stutter, but I was still able to play.

Battery performance is where the Infinix S5 Pro surprised me as it gave around a day and a half on a single charge. During this time I was making calls from the phone, playing heavy games on it, replying to emails, watching YouTube videos and browsing social media. The device took around three hours to charge from 0-100 per cent.

What to keep in mind if you buy?

Though this might seem as a big demand from my side, Infinix’s microUSB port is outdated. All of the smartphones are now moving to a USB Type-C standard and even budget smartphones like the Redmi 8A have started proving users with one.

The rear-mounted capacitive fingerprint sensor is not accurate and it was a hit or miss situation when it came to accuracy. I feel Infinix could have added a better fingerprint sensor to this phone.

This is a problem that most of Infinix S5 Pro users will have, which is that it only comes with the lowest Widevine CDM L3 support. This means that you can only stream video content on Prime Video, Netflix, Hotstar and more in 480p resolution. This I feel is not an apt resolution, when you have provided your consumers with a full HD+ display.

Coming to the display, the screen colours are quite punchy and extremely saturated, which just makes the eyes feel tired after a time. The display has a noticeable blue tinge to it with a few other colours like red and green being highly popped up. Even though the display is quite good, colour calibration has not been done properly on this model.

Infinix has partnered with third-party apps, due to which it comes with a number of bloatware ads that are not that useful. However, I can understand why they had to do it.

Now for the rear cameras, during low-light photography, the images came out with quite a lot of noise and if I turned the AI on, it would make the photos look artificial. The details were almost non-present. Due to the lack of a stabilisation motor, some images due to my shaky hands were quite blurred out.

The selfie camera failed to impress me. This is due to the fact, that the details were quite poor in the images I took and the dynamic range was also extremely low. The images came out with a red tinge to them. And while using the portrait mode, it did not capture the subject properly and was blurring the edges of the subject and even focusing on the wrong subject at times.

Who should buy it and why?

If you are in the market for a flashy phone that looks like a flagship, this is the phone for you. The pop-up selfie camera and a full-screen display at Rs 9,999 will be able to help most get over the device shortcomings. However, I feel that if you get over the looks of the device, you will be able to get a much better alternative at a similar price point. You can take a look at the Realme C3, Realme 6, Redmi Note 8, Samsung Galaxy M30 and more. Even though I like the product a lot, the competition offers much more at a similar price.

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