Not too long ago, Infinix was a brand you could easily underestimate. A new brand literally out of nowhere comes into the market and after a couple of years it completely takes it over. I’m sure you have seen this at the back of cars on Kenyan roads “The car in front of you is always a Toyota”, well I think it’s safe to assume wherever you are there will be an Infinix in someone’s hand
Forget how popular it has become. Infinix has become innovative as well. I am not saying that they have come up with anything new, no. What they have done however, is bring features and services thought to be of premium smartphones to their super affordable devices. Now they have brought down the premium design as well. Here enters the all new Infinix Zero 4.
I’ve used a number of Infinix smartphones but by far the best line for me is the Zero line. I find them fresh and innovative. I was very fond of the Zero 2. The Zero 3 on the other hand wasn’t a huge hit for me, I wasn’t crazy about the edges (too ambitious I thought) but the Zero 4 has to be by far the best looking Infinix ever!! I know I said that not too long ago about the Hot S but that has been clearly overshadowed by the Zero 4.
It’s the chamfered edges, the Unibody metal design, the big camera bump which I actually like, the wonderful omission of the normal capacitive buttons and instead the addition of dots to take their place. Now most of the time when I talk about the screen, I usually refer to its resolution and brightness. All those are good here but there is one very notable thing too. The screen is smooth. Like silky smooth to the touch, lending to an awesome experience scrolling on this device. Everyone who has used it agrees with me. This phone feels and looks exceptional and premium. I am impressed.
It comes with some top notch specs as well. This base version comes with a MT6753 chip with an octa-core processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB Internal storage with an expandable microSD slot and a super sharp Full HD 5.5-inch screen. It runs on Android Marshmallow 6.0 with their custom XOS Chameleon. I’ve talked about XOS a number of times and nothing much has changed with that on the Infinix Zero 4.
Using this device is a joy, (most of the time), I’ll get to that in a minute. The display is bright and crisp. Browsing the internet and reading on the Zero 4 is a pleasant experience. Everything looks colourful and bright, so do games and videos. The HD screen with a smooth curved finish offers some great viewing experiences, something that could satisfy most users.
The other thing that stood out for me was performance. I have used this device solely for the past month and I can say that it has only lagged twice or thrice, and this happened when I was low on battery. It easily handles your tasks and changing from one application to another doesn’t grind the phone’s performance to a halt.
The Zero 4 comes with a 3200mAH power battery, which isn’t the highest number I have seen or used. Its performance however is different from others. I could go through a whole day, sleep and only charge it in the morning to repeat this whole day to day process. The only reason I am able to be this relaxed with the battery is because of what Infinix calls XCHARGE. This is basically fast charging and on this, it is brilliant and extremely useful.
You could get 100% of battery charge in an hour and a half! Good bye all night charging, you could just plug it in the morning when you wake up, prepare and eat breakfast then get your fully charged device (if you take an hour and a half that is). This is extremely useful when you have a long day ahead of you, just carry the charger and even 15 mins of charge gives you a lot of juice. No phone in this day and age should come with anything less. Not only that, I found that it used the battery quite well. At the end of the day, it is not completely drained with at least 30% of charge left.
The other good thing about the Zero 4 is the camera. We have a pretty decent camera here, given how big the camera bump is. At the rear, we have a 16MP camera, with an LED flash and laser auto-focus. At the front, we have an 8MP wide selfie camera with flash of course. The pictures taken are quite good, in the right settings of course. If you are shooting on a bright sunny day, your pictures will look quite gorgeous. When darkens comes, it does struggle a bit but still manages to produce some amazing shots. I love the focus on this. It makes the subject look better and stand out more in the foreground. The only drawback here is how over processed the images may feel. It can look over sharpened. On the bright side, we do have manual mode here meaning that those who like to play around with shutter speed and ISO can use it to shoot creatively.
Like I said, using this device is a joy most of the time. Sometimes, it does fall back a bit. On two occasions while I was browsing on just one tab, the device got overly hot. It was hot all over and woe unto you if someone decides to call you at that moment. Being of metal build, the heat produced is very uncomfortable to the touch. Luckily this happens occasionally therefore for the most part, it shouldn’t bother you.
Other things that didn’t impress me much were small bugs or failure in hardware. For example, GPS tracking can become very frustrating. It takes a while to get your location, it seems inaccurate when it does that. The other use case where you see this is when you are hailing a cab. You can’t really trust on the location displayed, even during the trip, I could see my location jumping haphazardly across different streets, but given time it gets back to its senses. For a frequent user of maps, this can get very frustrating.
The last headache is in terms of syncing. I am not completely sure if this is a universal problem or just unique to me, some apps like Telegram are not completely synced. What I mean is that sometimes, I get notifications of new messages but most times I do not, therefore when I get into the app, all the messages suddenly come in at the same time. This is not the best user experience.
All in all, this is a solid device that I could recommend for myself and anyone in the market for a good smartphone. It’s beautiful, performs well and still manages to remain affordable. The best part about it is that there is a pro mode of this. It is called the Infinix Zero 4 Plus, which has better specifications and since this is already quite good, I’ll be curious to find out how much better the Plus actually is.
For 18,500/= you cannot go wrong with this device.
