I’m impressed with the Infinix NOTE7 not only does it come with 5GB of data from Airtel Uganda, but packs better upgrades gave an accepted performance much better than the NOTE6 making it Infinix’s yet best produced smartphone. The mid-ranger sized beast impressed us with the performance because of its MediaTek Helio G70 chipset which is ideal for mainstream smartphones. The large display, bigger battery, the quad camera and the fingerprint sensor side mount come as the main highlighters of the phone.
After two weeks using the phone (
B-roll hands-on), our opinon about the phone.
Display, Build & Design (DBD): — Infinix Mobility has slightly improved the DBD of the NOTE7 in comparison to its predecessor. The downer is that the phone still supports 720p resolution. Today with smartphone manufacturers introducing 4K resolution to their smartphones, at least the least Infinix can offer is 1080p. However, 720p is still not bad after all since it provides rich-colors for viewership.
The display gives accurate colors, fair contrast, dip blacks & white, and saturated colors — thus better viewing experience especially when watching media like movies or music videos. Under direct sunlight, the brightness seemed sufficient to comfortably read text and watch media. The display is also reflective, and we also found to be quite bright and interesting in outdoor conditions.
On the build and design, Infinix made slight changes, like giving the phone a huge display; 6.95-Inches, side-mounted the fingerprint sensor on the power button which is a good idea. Once you have added your fingerprint, pressing the power button unlocks the phone swiftly. Previously, the fingerprint sensor was at the back and you had to press the power button and then use the sensor to unlock the phone.
Another change in design is the camera setup. The quad camera comes in a circular design setting.
Before touch the phone might seem heavy which in this case isn’t. It’s light weight and comfortable in a grip. The whole build is plastic which glossy finish at the back giving the shiny finish that catches the consumers eye that draws them to buying one.
The power and volume buttons still appear at side-right while on the left-side is a 2+1 card slot that houses two 4G Nano-SIMs and a microSD card simultaneously. At the top is nothing while at the bottom you have single speaker grill, microUSB port, and 3.5mm auido jack. Infinix ditched the X-Pen on the NOTE7 so there’s no slot for it on the phone.
Performance: — run smoothly so did the apps as we didn’t notice much drops only a few frame skips in videos that are 1080p resolution; anything above its 720p resolution. But all-in-all the performance was descent. Saw swiftness when switching between apps and the phone didn’t occasionally stutter as we saw with its predecessor.
The 4GB RAM is not much of a performance bottleneck, if you are not running multiple apps that consume so much of the RAM in the background, multitasking is smooth. Thankfully, we did not come across instances of unresponsive apps. This is because of its MediaTek Helio G70 chipset which is ideal for mainstream smartphone like the NOTE7.
The phone runs on Cheetah XOS v6.0 based on Android 10 from Android Pie that came with the NOTE6. The XOS gives swift performance to the phone and also makes the apps and design look much cleaner.
Battery: — The phone ships with and is powered by a non-removable Li-Po 5,000 mAh battery which supports fast charging 18W. Charging from 0% to 50% takes 35 minutes, get a full power then can take a hour. We were impressed how the phone could offer to watch a full 1 hour and 45 minutes movie at 5% battery before powering down. As minimal user, you can use the phone for three days on a single charge. An over user can take about a day and a half probably (depends), and a small user can take even up to four days.
Having a bigger battery capacity lets consumers spend more time on their smartphone without the need to charge all the time. This is one of Infinix’s goal when producing their phones, “to let users spend more time on their phones on a single charge.”
Having used the phone at half of its battery capacity for three days, and later getting refilled in less than an hour to full power is a 5-out-5 for us.
Camera Performance: — we see that the phone comes with a MediaTek Helio G70 chipset which is ideal for mainstream smartphone like the NOTE7 thereby supporting the camera’s performance.
When it comes to cameras, Infinix is proving it’s on its toes to provide its consumers the best picture. The camera is always the phone’s selling point, and the NOTE7 comes with a quad-rear camera with 48MP (wide) + 2MP (macro) + 2MP (depth) + 2MP (dedicated video camera) sensors. The front-facing punch hole camera comes with a 16MP (wide) sensor. Both these cameras have the capability to shoot videos at 1080p at 30fps.
The outcome from the cameras is good, both for the photos and videos. The sharpness of the photos is average as noise still appears in photos, the saturation is balanced, the highlights and shadows are good. Overall, the cameras are good and any of its outcomes is worth sharing.
Security: — nothing has changed much from the predecessor, it’s the FaceID lock and fingerprint mount we are looking at. The only change is the mount of the fingerprint sensor which is an ideal thing the company opt for. Setting up any of this takes literally less than a minute, works faster and much better than the NOTE6. In very low light setting you could set up a FaceID lock and unlock at the same time.
