Infinix Hot 6 Pro review – A decent deal for media consumption

In the past one year that Infinix has been in the Indian market, the smartphone manufacturer has brought us some exciting phones including the Infinix Hot S3. The brand has remained majorly as an online player and made an impact in the budget smartphone segment competing with bigger players including Xiaomi and others. The new Infinix Hot 6 Pro from the brand is an excellent smartphone for users who need a more prominent display to enjoy the content, the device is being priced very aggressively and competes with the Redmi 5 from Xiaomi.

While the smartphone does have a lot to offer, we go through the details in this review reviewing every aspect to give our opinions on the phone.

Design and Display

We got to review the matte black variant of the Infinix Hot 6 Pro, and the device looks very slick, the device surprisingly offers pretty good grip given the matte design. The matte finish on the back panel also helps it get rid of the fingerprint-attracting nature which has become very common on smartphones these days. The moment you take the smartphone in your hand, the lightness of it will surprise you, the weight distribution is excellent and not concentrated in any area of the smartphone. The overall thickness of the smartphone is very less, and the Infinix Hot 6 Pro is one of the most comfortable to use smartphone of the given size. The power button on the smartphone has a textured finish which makes it very easy to distinguish from the other volume buttons. The 3.5mm is to the bottom of the smartphone along with the MicroUSB port and the single speaker, to the left is the SIM card slot with support for two Nano-SIM cards and a dedicated microSD card slot.

The Infinix Hot 6 Pro comes with a non-removable back and has the fingerprint sensor on the back to the center of the device. To the rear is the dual-camera setup for the portrait bokeh mode in the camera, the dual cameras are aligned horizontally like what we see on the Plus variants of the iPhones. On the front, most of the area is taken up by the display which is massive at 5.99-inches. There is also a notification LED near the earpiece to alert you of a notification subtly.

Coming to the display, the 5.99-inches display bears a resolution of HD+ and has the 18:9 aspect ratio, this makes it taller and results in relatively smaller bezels on the sides. The display is bright and was very much usable even in the outdoors. We liked the color reproduction on screen, and they appeared very vibrant and punchy. Although the text and icons weren’t as sharp, it is acceptable given that the display only has an HD+ resolution despite having an enormous screen. The display doesn’t have the Gorilla Glass protection but offers scratch resistance from NEG.

Performance

The Infinix Hot 6 Pro is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 chipset along with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. The Infinix Hot 6 Pro was a pretty good smartphone regarding performance, all the transition animations, switch between apps and browsing through heavy web pages were all handled smoothly by the smartphone. While most of the usage was managed perfectly by the smartphone, the benchmark results were just average and not something that can be called praiseworthy. In the AnTuTu benchmark, the score returned was just 43,981 and the GFXbench test resulted in a dismal frame rate of only 13fps. Most apps worked without any issues although they took longer than usual to load up. We ran our regular list of apps on the smartphone including a few banking, social networking, chatting and other miscellaneous apps and all of them worked well without any sort of stutter.

The large display on the smartphone is clearly for media consumption and gaming, so we placed our emphasis on them. Playing a few videos from YouTube and watching a movie on Netflix left us contended with the color reproduction and brightness. Although the sharpness was a little low and a higher resolution would have been icing on the cake, the current setup is very much satisfying. The speaker is pretty loud as well, but an enjoyable experience can be achieved only by plugging in a pair of a headset to the 3.5mm audio jack.

Camera

The Infinix Hot 6 Pro comes with a 13MP primary camera on the rear which is aided by a 2MP secondary sensor for depth detection. The focus was locked very quickly by the camera, and the app is undoubtedly very well optimized for quick response. The images captured by the camera varied with the conditions indoor and outdoor. While the camera did capture the details of the nearby objects, everything else at a distance had grainy noise and blurry edges which might be a result of post-capture processing. The close-up shots had similar issues lacking details and sharpness. There is an HDR mode in the camera app but the same needs to be triggered manually and the results weren’t impressive either.

The dual camera on the rear means there is a portrait mode, the edge detection was not up to the mark most of the times, and only on some occasions, the edge was detected well. The camera struggles to find a lock on the focus in the low light situations, and most images turn out grainy or underexposed. On the front is the 5MP camera which shoots at a resolution up to 1080p. The front camera is not very different and provides an average experience as well. There is also a front flash for low light selfies, but the front camera doesn’t capture enough details to make justice to its presence.

Battery and software

The Infinix Hot 6 Pro comes with a massive 4,000mAh battery and gives a day full of heavy usage or a day and a half of normal usage. We could get about 5-6 hours of screen on time on an average which was surprising considering the size of the battery. The battery charges painfully slowly, and we took over three and a half hours to charge the smartphone to full, this combined with the average battery life makes it challenging to use daily unless you charge overnight.

The Infinix Hot 6 Pro runs on a custom OS called the Hummingbird XOS v3.2 based on Android 8 Oreo with the May security patch applied. While the skin does look very different from the stock Android experience, the functionality is the same for the most part. The brand has added several apps into the software including a Web Browser, a forum app and a few others. While the number of preinstalled apps is not high, they cannot be uninstalled. The XOS software also comes with a one-handed mode, scrolling screenshot and a Game DnD mode for uninterrupted gaming. There is also support for face recognition unlock, but it is very slow like the fingerprint sensor on the device.

Verdict

The Infinix Hot 6 Pro is a great media device with a decent battery backup and an above average display. The slower SoC in the device makes it difficult for the device to compete with the other smartphones like Redmi 5 which are offered at a similar price point. The camera on the device was disappointing, and both the fingerprint sensor as well as the face recognition for unlocking were sluggish and slow.