Without mincing words, Infinix Zero 4 Plus is one of the best devices I’ve held so far this year. From the neat design to great performance, it is a device that takes a bold step towards perfection. For a company making its debut into the premium high-end market, it is quite safe to say Infinix Mobility got it quite right.
Before going into the full review, you may want to see this previous article for the unboxing.
Form Factor & Display
As said during the unboxing, Infinix Zero 4 Plus leaves a very good first impression that doesn’t easily wear off. The design looks great and the build is solid. Infinix Zero 4 Plus makes previous devices in the Zero product line look like child’s play. No joke.
This is a pretty big device with almost 6 inches of screen space, and that naturally contributes to the bulk. With a weight of 203g and a thickness of over 8mm, you’re sure to feel the weight, but hey, a phone as big as this sure needs an equally big battery and this bulkiness shouldn’t be a problem. 6-inch devices are not made for people with small hands.
The 5.98-inch screen comes with a 1080p resolution and the display looks worthy of a flagship device. Colors are vivid and pictures look great. The Gorilla Glass protection has slightly curved edges, sunlight legibility is good and the auto-brightness feature cranks up the brightness when it needs to. The device comes with on-screen navigation keys.
The front of the devices doesn’t hold much. At the top is the 8MP selfie camera, with LED flash.
On the right side is the volume key and power button, while the right side holds the SIM slot. The second SIM slot is a hybrid slot that either takes a SIM card or an SD card. A large number of us don’t like this.
At the top is the 3.5mm earphone jack and looking at the bottom, there’s a micro-USB port. There appears to be two speaker grills but only one actually outputs sound, the other is for the microphone.
Flipping the phone over, the first thing that strikes you is the greatly emphasized 20.7MP rear camera. The big camera bump can’t go without being noticed as it looks a bit too much. Beside it is the dual-LED flash and Laser AF sensor. Below that is the fingerprint sensor which works great based on my interaction so far.
The corners are slightly curved and the beveled edges seem to improve grip. Apart from the huge camera bump which may not be a problem for many and the hybrid SIM slot, everything about the design looks great.
Software, Hardware and Performance
The device ships with Android 6.0, with Infinix’s customized UI on top. Nothing much has changed on XOS Chameleon since it debuted. Operations on the Zero 4 Plus is quite smooth and multitasking with 4GB RAM is great. RAM management also looks good, the system only takes about 28% memory at boot.
Helio X20 is a decacore processor having three clusters. The highest clocked is the Cortex-A72 cluster with two cores at 2.1GHz. There are two other separate clusters with 4 cores each clocked at 1.4GHz. Performance is good and the Mali-T880 GPU handles any game or graphic-intensive app. The device got a score of 84,429 on Antutu. A score of 1590 was achieved in single core-processing on Geekbench 4 and multicore processing hit a record of 4518.
Coming down to sensors, Infinix Zero 4 Plus packs a lot more than you need. CPU-Z reports a total of 19 sensors and this device looks truly made for professionals.
Whether you need the pedometer and step counter to monitor fitness activities, the gyroscope for VR and learning, or the magnetometer as a professional, the Zero 4 Plus got you covered.
Storage & Connectivity
Infinix Zero 4 Plus comes with a 32GB storage which is expandable. There’s an SD card slot but this is an hybrid slot shared with the second SIM. You need to give up using a second SIM card to use an SD card and you can expand it with up to 128GB card.
The Zero 4 is 4G enabled, works with Smile, ntel, MTN, Glo and other 4G networks available in the country and the network option lets you peg it to 4G.
Camera
Infinix made a big overhaul of the camera app, stripping off features a lot of people don’t even use. The usual camera settings are no where to be found and the minimalist UI, well, is a really big surprise knowing its quite unusual. How does the camera perform? Here are some sample images for your perusal. Click to enlarge.
The camera app wants you to simply point and shoot without messing with any settings. Some may find this super cool and its almost certain that those who want more control may not really dig it.
If the professional settings is what you appreciate most in a mobile camera app, you’re going to love the streamlined UI that presents the controls as a dial. If you’re confused about these professional settings, you can take a look at this article I wrote some months ago. There are predefined filters to beautiful your image and gimmicks like “say cheese to unlock” are all gone. Here is an image taken in a poorly lit room.
The one below was taken in the same room with no flash, just turning up the ISO, shutter speed and exposure compensation did the trick.
Battery & Multimedia
Infinix Zero 4 Plus comes with a 4,000mAh battery which is big enough to last anyone through the day unless you’re the type that play game for hours. It comes with fast charge and if you’re putting the phone through moderate use, you won’t need to carry a power bank around.
The Zero 4 Plus’ mono speaker doesn’t perform bad. It ranks above quite a lot of devices in the market and the audio quality is good.
Verdict
Infinix Zero 4 Plus is a device that’s hard to criticize since it checks almost all the boxes. There are a few cons but they are petty and trivial… like the camera bump and the deceptive dual speaker grill. These are no deal breakers and like I mentioned earlier in the article, it is one of the best devices I’ve held recently.
Is the price justified? That depends on your perspective. For a ₦116,000 high-end device that checks almost all the boxes, it doesn’t look like a bad deal.
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