By Krishna Sinha Chaudhury
New Delhi, Dec 6 (IANS): China-based Transsion Holdings made its debut in India in August with Infinix Note 4 and Hot 4 Pro smartphones that did not make much of a noise in the competitive domestic smartphone market.
Now, the company has launched Infinix Zero 5 that joins the race of dual-camera devices coming from its Chinese counterparts that have flooded the Indian market.
Infinix Zero 5 sports a dual-camera set-up at the rear and has a single sensor for the selfie camera at the front.
Launched at Rs 17,999, Zero 5 with 64GB onboard storage and 6GB RAM essentially competes with the likes of Honor 9i.
Here is how the smartphone fares in everyday usage.
Infinix Zero 5 sports a metal unibody design that is free of any creek and felt top-notch.
The edges are smooth and offer an ergonomic grip while adding to the premium feel even as the phone sports a big design language.
The 5.98-inch Full HD display with 2.5D glass atop it was rich and bright.
The colour reproduction was great and the viewing angles were good. Sunlight legibility of the display was impressive too.
The rear camera placement in the device reminds us of Huawei P9's camera design language sans the "Leica" lens branding.
A much-talked-about feature of Zero 5 is its dual-primary camera with 12MP wide-angle lens and 13MP telephoto lens that added good "Bokeh" effect to photos with blurred background.
We found the pictures to be satisfactory in proper lighting conditions. Colour reproduction was good; so was the saturation level.
Two antenna bands run through the top and bottom of the phone that give a rich look.
The fingerprint sensor lies below the camera set-up and was quick to unlock the device.
An octa-core MediaTek Helio P25 processor, coupled with 6GB RAM, does its job well in terms of multi-tasking and running several applications simultaneously.
We did not notice any significant stutter while playing games, browsing YouTube and using social media apps.
A hefty 4350mAh battery powers the device that easily lasted over a day for us on moderate usage, with 4G running on one SIM slot.
We especially liked the battery performance of the smartphone which gave us close to five days of stand-by time on a single charge.
The bottom of the device houses a USB Type-C charger port and a single speaker grille that is loud enough.
The company's custom XOS 3.0 user interface (UI) based on Android 7.0 Nougat operating system (OS) is smooth but do not expect it to be similar to stock Android OS.
What does not work?
The 16MP selfie shooter with f/2.0 aperture and flash is strictly okay. Images taken from the front shooter lacked detail.
Image taken from the primary camera took quite some time to process -- there was significant shutter lag. The photos clicked under low-light conditions had noise.
The device's hefty battery gets support of "XCharge" (which is fast-charging feature) but that is not one of the fastest-charging technologies out there.
Conclusion: The bright, colourful display, premium build, primary camera performance and solid battery life are among the high points of the device and makes for an interesting option in the Rs 15,000-Rs 18,000 segment. It can appeal more to buyers if the company introduces updates (let's say for camera improvement) to fill in a few caveats.