Infinix Mobility’s latest smartphone in the Kenyan market, the Infinix Zero 3, went on sale this week in the country at a too-good-to-be-true price of Kshs 18,500 if you purchase via online retailer Jumia. Just from looking at it, one can tell that Infinix pulled all the stops to deliver a device that will further cement its status in the Kenyan mobile phone market. The design, the camera and the overall performance of the device are all on point.
Having had the phone for just a short time, one of the things I immediately noticed was that battery drain on the device was such a big issue. While Infinix packed a beefy 3,000mAh non-removable battery unit on its latest device, it looked like the software was not being too kind to it and it became uncommon to witness the device shut down unexpectedly just under a minute of it telling you that it was now below 10%. At first, I thought that this maybe had to do with a faulty device or it was unique to some users but after losing my first review unit and getting a replacement unit, I still had the same issues.
It looks like Infinix was aware of this because last night I received a notification of a pending software update to not only fix this but also other minor bugs and a few improvements. This was the second software update I was getting on the Infinix Zero 3 since there’s another one you’ll get as soon as you boot up the device for the very first time. In fact, the update is from just a week ago since it is dated 13th January.
Here is what update X552-H952-A1-L-20160113 brings:
- XUI gets an upgrade
- That high battery drain issue, as already noted, has been fixed – “optimized power consumption for longer standby time”.
- A countdown timer to how long it will take to fully charge the device will now show up on the lock screen every time you plug in the Infinix Zero 3.
- Two new Infinix applications have been added: Infinix Music and Xcloud. Infinix Music replaces Google Music as the default music player application on the device. The latter has been dropped in favour of Infinix’s own homegrown app. I’ll test it and see how it measures up. Check our forums for a discussion on music players on Android.
- Sliding 3 fingers upwards (from the bottom of the device’s display towards the top/notification bar) results in a screenshot being captured. That is really nice.
- This is the big one according to me: one-handed use, finally! One of the features I bemoaned as lacking when I spent time with the 6-inch Infinix Note 2 was the ability to use the device one-handed. The Note 2 is such a big device and since this is an update to the new XUI which the Note 2 also runs, it means quite a lot. While the Infinix Zero 3 is not such a big device really to people like me, 5.5-inches is still considerably large to a number of people. They will be glad to know that simply swiping left or right from the on-screen home button results in a smaller window that makes it easy to swipe into the app drawer, search for the hottest trending YouTube videos on the YouTube app, chatting with friends on WhatsApp and clearing notifications using just the thumb.
- Stability and bug fixes.
The update is already available over the air (OTA). However, if you are yet to get it and are quite familiar with the ins and outs of manually installing software updates on mobile devices then you can grab the update here.
