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We unboxed this device a couple of weeks ago, and Infinix Note 3 is one of the phones with a battery life that gives you peace of mind. Although it doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles design-wise, the raw power it packs greatly makes up for this.
Infinix Note 3 is the third smartphone in Infinix Mobility’s product line of budget mid-range phablets. Does the Note 3 differ from its predecessors? Yes, in more ways than one.
Design and display
Infinix has upped it’s design game with the introduction of the Hot S, and this trend continues with the Note 3. Although it doesn’t look very ground-breaking, Infinix Note 3 looks better than the first two phablets in its product line. The slight curve around the edges and the shiny metal frame looks good. The front panel doesn’t tell much: The earpiece at the top has the camera and light sensor on the left, and the LED flash and notification light on its right.
The 6-inch display comes with 1080p resolution and of course, it has a screen worthy of a mid-range phablet. You shouldn’t expect crappy displays on smartphones these days unless you’re buying a budget device with an ultra-low resolution on a wide screen.
The navigation keys are placed on-screen but unfortunately, there’s no way to hide them like some devices allow and you can can hide them from view when they get in the way like most devices allow. This has to be activated from the display settings.
At the bottom is the micro-USB port with the speaker grill on its right and the microphone orifice on the left.
The right side holds the volume keys and volume button. With the space between the volume down button and power key just a few millimeters apart, a volume rocker here would’ve been a better option. Above these is the micro-SD slot. The right side holds the tray that houses two micro-SIM cards.
At the top of the phone is a 3.5mm audio jack.
The back holds the 13MP camera with a dual-LED flash just below it. Aligned underneath this is the fingerprint sensor that’s on par with what we saw on the Hot S.
Battery
Talking about the battery, it’s one of the most interesting things about this device. Infinix Hot 3 comes with a non-removable 4500mAh battery that performs greatly. It’s the sort of battery that makes owning a power bank rather redundant. With regular use, this should last for two days, but then, we have different definitions of regular use.
In a video loop test carried out with the battery at 100%, volume at 50%, brightness at 50% and 3G turned on, the battery lasted for exactly 11 hours and seven minutes till the battery dropped down to 1%.
The phone charges pretty fast too. Here is the result of our charging test:
- 8:24 AM – battery starts charging from 0%
- 8:38 AM – battery charges to 24%
- 9:00 AM – battery charges to 52%
- 9:39 AM – battery charges to 94%
- 9:56 AM – battery charges to 99%
- 9: 58 AM – battery charges to 100%
The battery took about 15 minutes to hit 25% and it took approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes to fully charge.
Performance, software & storage
Infinix Note 3 is powered by an octa-core Helio X10 processor clocked at 1.3GHz. There’s a 2GB RAM on-board and performance is good. At least, it processes whatever you throw at it. A 2GB RAM too is expected to handle multitasking to a very reasonable extent.
The benchmark scores are moderate with the device hitting 39176 on Antutu, 598 in Geekbench 4 single-core processing and 2587 in multi-core processing.
XOS, the rebranded XUI hasn’t changed since when we saw it on the Hot S. The custom skin has only one shortcoming: the default alphabetical arrangement of the app drawer you are not allowed to change.
The device comes with a 16GB storage out of which a user is left with just about 9GB. However, you can expand this with an SD card.
Sensors
Unlike some devices being sold into the Nigerian market with just basic sensors, Infinix Mobility managed to pack a few other sensors into this device. Apart from the regular accelerometer, proximity sensor and light sensor, CPU-Z shows that the device has a software gyroscope which lets you watch 360 degree videos and run VR apps and games.
There’s also a linear acceleration sensor, a gravity sensor, a rotation vector sensor, a magnetometer and an orientation sensor.
Camera
As a rule of thumb, I try as much not to expect stellar performance from the camera on a mid-range device. However, Infinix Note 3 still delivers decent pictures. As with most of its smartphones, Infinix Note 3 doesn’t come with a barebone camera app.
The settings puts full control in your hands and the professional mode even lets you get the best out of the 13MP rear shooter. Here are a few sample shots (click to enlarge):
Low-light photography is aided with a dual-LED flash and of course, there’s a night mode. This shot was taken around 7:30PM:
Using the night mode greatly enhanced the picture taken:
Connectivity
If you’re keen on getting a device that supports 4G connectivity, the variant used for this review may not be the right device for you. There’s a “Pro” version said to support 4G/LTE but this is nowhere to be found in the market for now.
Verdict
Devices in the Note product line have always been pretty solid when it comes to battery and this device further proves that fact. Infinix Note 3 will have to compete with popular devices in the same price range like Tecno Camon C9, Lenovo Vibe P1, Gionee M5 Lite and more.
Except for the lack of 4G/LTE support, it seems the Note 3 has what it takes to win hearts. It’s presently available on Jumia for N62,000.
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