Infinix Mobility, the company behind popular budget smartphone brand Infinix, is expected to unveil a new smartphone with a fingerprint scanner and a dedicated front-facing camera for selfies.
One of Infinix Mobility’s co-founders, Benjamin Jiang, has been teasing the device on his Facebook page for the last one month and last night he posted an update indicating that the device will be going on sale soon in the Middle East through e-commerce site Souq.com.
For those of you not in the know, Souq is the Amazon of the Middle East. Souq is to the Middle East as Jumia is to Africa and Flipkart is to India, so to say. Just recently, it closed a $275 million round of funding that valued it at $1 billion, earning it the much-talked about unicorn status (i.e. startups valued at $1 billion or more).
While exact details of the device like its actual name, other specifications and pricing are not yet available, the two highlighted features are already confirmed.
The dedicated selfie camera, from the images posted on Mr Jiang’s Facebook page (see above image), may likely borrow a lot of its looks and general design from that on HTC’s 2014 mid-range Desire Eye. That may mean packing exactly the same amount of pixels on the front sensor as on the main sensor at the back, a first for Infinix.
Another first for Infinix will be the inclusion of a fingerprint sensor. Since Infinix devices have never had a physical home button, this can safely be assumed to be at the back of the device.
RAM will likely be not less than 2 GB since Infinix’s new custom overlay, XUI, is resource intensive and being blamed by users on its own forums for the botched Android Marshmallow rollout to devices like the Infinix Note 2.
Infinix may also release its own dedicated headsets with the new device if this photo posted on Mr Jiang’s page is anything to go by:
Infinix’s sister brand, Tecno, has been trying its hand in the headset space for a while now. It released some average earphones for its music-focused Boom J7 smartphone last year before upping its game with yet another pair of headsets (this time larger) that it packaged freely with every purchase of the Tecno Boom J8. However, it is last year’s flagship smartphone, the Tecno Phantom 5, that really proved that it can try when it comes to designing quality earphones. Our fingers are crossed on what Infinix has in store for us.
Infinix’s move to release a budget smartphone with a fingerprint scanner is very much in line with recent happenings. Its latest competitor in some of its key markets in Africa and the Middle East, Chinese device maker Xiaomi, has released a new smartphone with the feature. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 which was announced in January and went on sale a month later, is a $150 smartphone that has a fingerprint scanner that is just as fast and accurate as that on Xiaomi’s flagship device for 2016, the Mi 5.
