Infinix Note 7 was recently launched and has been available in the market for a while now. We finally got to play around with it, taking through its paces.
Infinix’s latest smartphone comes packed with value for a reasonable price. You are getting amazing hardware quality, specs and features which we talk about in our review.
Design
The Infinix Note 7 looks familiar as it resembles most 2020 smartphones with the left-oriented hole-punch selfie camera cutout.
The Infinix Note 7 is a beautiful phone from its sides. You can choose between three colours – Forest Green, Aether Black and Bolivia Blue. The phone itself is elegant and with a premium feeling with the colour gradient back.
However, the back is slippery and a fingerprint magnet so you’ll have to slap the case on it.
The back also sports the circular camera back that houses the quad-camera setup and quad-LED flashlight
We get the traditional button placement on the right with the power button sitting below a volume buttons. Both buttons have great feedback.
The power button is the fingerprint sensor that’s fast and reliable when unlocking the phone.
On the left side is the slot for two SIM cards and an additional slot of your MicroSD card. The Infinix Note 7 supports 4G VoLTE and that includes Faiba 4G network.
The display though not record-breaking is decent enough. I don’t know why Infinix backtracked to a 720p LCD screen. The Note 6 had a 1080p AMOLED screen.
The Infinity O display is huge at 6.95″ and is Gorilla Glass protected. That huge screen gives you tons of room to literally accomplish anything you want.
A selfie camera disrupts the display. The thin top bezel hosts the earpiece, sensors and a notification light.
The headphone jack, speaker, microphone and micro-USB charging port are at the bottom.
Performance
The Infinix Note 7 comes running Android 10 and XOS 6.1. XOS is refined but still has a long way to go in terms of balancing the granular tweaks and the easy to use intuitiveness.
There are still cobwebs that Infinix needs to clear including the unnecessary apps and adware that comes with the phone.
Under the hood, you get octa-core Mediatek Helio G70 (12 nm) processor with Mali-G52 2EEMC2 GPU. Our unit came with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage.
XOS comes with nice additions such as Game mode and Live Transcribe. These utilities and tools add value without getting in the way.
The phone was pretty fast and with ample memory, you will not see any issues with app performance. There are no hiccups and multitasking on the phone feels very snappy. Minor Slowdowns will be faced when playing graphic-intense games at their highest settings such as PUBG.
The bottom flaring speaker working with the earpiece offered stereo sound and with DTS Audio processing to give you immersive multimedia experience whether gaming, watching video or listening to music and podcasts.
Battery Life
Infinix included a huge 5000mAh battery that actually makes a difference in day-to-day use.
In my two weeks of using the phone, I could push a whole day without worrying about the charging it. Most of the days with heavy usage, I ended up with 30% by the time I was calling it a night.
On lighter days, I would get up to 50% by the end of the day.
Mixed-use had me seeing over 9 hours of screen on time for most days.
Battery life is great and most users will be happy using the Infinix Note 7. I didn’t have to worry about constantly checking the battery percentage.
Infinix included 18W fast charging so that a welcome upgrade. Infinix should now include type-c charging while at it.
Charging it up from empty to 70% takes an hour and another hour to fully juice it up.
Overall, battery life has been outstanding even though I didn’t leave my apartment enough to test real word usage.
Cameras
The Infinix Note 7 features five cameras. A quad rear setup and a punch-hole selfie camera.
The quad setup includes a 48 MP f/1.8(wide), 2 MP f/2.4 (macro), 2 MP f/2.4, (depth) and a 2 MP, f/1.8, (dedicated video camera).
A 16MP in-display camera takes care of the selfies.
The camera modes to shoot in include Bokeh, Portrait, beauty, AR shot, Panorama, Video and Short Video and SuperNight Mode for low light shots.
You can shoot at 48MP too for more detail in bright scenes.
Click on the photos to expand
Here are some shots
Selfies
Beauty
Portrait
Regular shots
There is a good shot to shot consistency which most people will love.
Bokeh
SuperNight mode shots
It’s worth noting that you can use the SuperNight Mode to shoot better pictures during the day. Here are some samples compared to the regular photos.
There’s the regular video mode and short video mode. Videos are shot at 1080p at 30fps. Short videos can be shot between 15 second and 60 seconds for sharing on social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram Stories.
Thank to the decent stabilization offered, video are incredibly smooth although there’s judder when you quickly move your hand.
Overall, the photos turn out well for sharing on social media especially those shot on well-lit environments. The large sensor makes for shots with a shallower depth of field for that natural bokeh effect. The colours on the photos are natural and muted. Super night mode brings out highlights found in the shadows while also avoiding overexposure in the blown-out skies taken on the regular mode.
Lowlight and super night mode shots fare better and you can see that Infinix compensates by increasing saturation and brightness on the photos.
Daylight photos come out well detailed and with lush and rich colours. I like the consistent background separation in the bokeh and portrait shots
All in all, the Infinix Note 7 has a set of greatly improved cameras that can shoot well in most environments and you’ll never go wrong with it.
Pricing and Availability
The Infinix Note 7 with the 128GB/6GB configuration retails at Ksh 21,399 while the one with 64GB/4GB configuration sells at Ksh 18,099. The Infinix Note 7 Lite sales at Ksh 15,799.
The devices can be purchased at Infinix’s online marketplace, Xpark with free delivery countrywide for all models.
You can also visit their official retail stores who have put up measures to keep everyone safe including its staff and consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bottomline
At kSH 18,000, the Infinix Note 7 is a culmination of refinements made over the previous Note lineup that offers value through its dependable performance in terms of software and camera plus all the other impressive set of features such as the excellent battery life, fast charging, decent display and eye-catching design making it one of the best affordable phones under the 20K market.
