(Part one of two)
It is a segment where there is much to battle in. The sub-P10K niche is one that is well defined but dilly dally between image processing and gaming power.
The Infinix Hot 10S is a reincarnation of a steady Eddy from the brand but it has a lot more oomph to it and it resides at the middle of the sub-P10K range–P5,990.00 for the 4GB RAM with 64GB and P6,990.00 for the 6GB RAM variant. The price alone puts it at a rung, way up in the spec-vs.-price ladder.
Many smartphones crowd this category.
Offerings from Realme and circuit-board twin Oppo are plenty. But it is the C-club series and Narzo line that offer significant value. Then there is the Redmi 9 series and a spattering of phones from Cherry Mobile. Even the bigger brand try to sneak into this market with models that have either a good camera or acceptable gaming specs but not all.
There is, I noticed one thing that defines this price niche. The availability of better processors gives way to more powerful cameras or crisp screen. The processors are common to almost all these phones. This is a product feature mix, and the market accepts the compromises because of the retail price.
This was my perception until I met the Infinix Hot 10S. It looks and feels solid, and overwhelms in important, significant features and compromises elsewhere. And that is the game in the P10K and below segment phones.
I wanted to use software to test speed and other things but I didn’t I will reserve that for when I get other brands to compare it to. Let’s see how it goes.
Design and construction
On the front, you find the near bezel-less glass 6.82” HD+ IPS LCD display. It’s a fairly clean-looking design, sporting a notch for the 8MP front camera with dual flash. These LEDS, however, don’t double as LED notification lights.
The rear of the phone has the 48MP triple camera setup with quad-LED flash, as well the fingerprint sensor. There is a slight bump in the camera housing, but it never interfered with daily use.
The arrangement of the buttons and ports is pretty ordinary. The left of the phone houses the 3-in-1 tray that houses the two nanoSIM card slots, as well as the microSD bay; while the right has volume rockers and power button. At the Southside are the microphone hole, a 3.5mm audio jack, the microUSB charging port, and a single, bottom-firing mono speaker. All these have to mentioned in the light of familiarity. Nothing new in this side, but wait until we get further
As for the design, it sports a sort of late 2019, to early 2020 phone design with the centered front camera notch, as well as the rear camera bump. The phone itself is made from a smooth, glossy plastic that catches fingerprints quite easily. The phone’s rounded edges, glossy plastic, and lack of other textures and materials doesn’t lend it looking too much like a premium product, but it doesn’t look cheap, or poorly made, either – its aesthetic fits in well with the rest of the midrange phone market.
The Infinix Hot 10T is a large phone, and it feels pretty solid in the hand. It weighs just enough such that it doesn’t come off as flimsy, while still lacking the heft of a phone made of more premium materials.
Display and media
The phone has a massive 6.82” IPS LCD screen, running at a 90Hz refresh rate, 720p – something you’d rarely find on a phone at this price range. The display has a rather narrow 20:9 aspect ratio, and sports a PPI of around 264.
The 90Hz refresh rate is a very welcome edition in a phone at this price, providing an enjoyable and fluid media experience when watching videos, or playing games. This is one point that is important to gamers and entertainment buffs.
The display suffers from a rather severe lack of brightness. The display struggles to provide a usable experience in direct sunlight, or sometimes even in the shade on a sunny day. I find myself keeping the brightness slider at around 65 percent, even when operating the phone in dark environments such as in front of my computer desk. And it seems to lean more on the cooler side, with the whites appearing bluer when compared to a more color-accurate display such as my PC’s monitor.
The phone’s speaker is loud enough for general use. It suffers from an overall lack of quality, becoming distorted at higher volumes, as it’s a single-firing mono speaker.
Amazing camera
The front camera gets a satisfactory mark–it is one of those balancing acts in the phone. Though a capable image engine, it lacks the skill to catch finer details and textures in skin, hair, or clothing even in ideal lighting. The front camera despite its more than efficient pixel ratio is prone to overexposure, with its depth-sensing capabilities on the so-so side, often having halo-ing around edges with the phone’s DoF features. It does, however, boast of a good enough color profile.
The rear camera is amazing.
Like most cameras, it does so in ideal lighting. But here is my take: the Hot 10T goes toe-to-toe with far more expensive phones in the midrange category. The primary camera takes sharp, detailed, and crisp images that boast good exposure handling and color reproduction.
Though most cameras fall short in darker environments, the Hot 10S delivers much satisfaction for nightscapes–the ones that deliver light into the camera. With phone’s HDR or night mode on, photos can capture well–better than most. Other phone cameras will struggle to balance the exposure–leading to overblown highlights, and dull blacks. From both the front and rear cameras, this phone stands a much better chance.
The camera software leans very heavily to point-and-shoot only. It has very few options for shooting modes, and has no full manual control. Thankfully, the AI camera mode is smart enough to adjust its settings for most environments.
The Hot 10T shoots 2k video from both the front and rear cameras. There is no option for changing the framerate of the videos, and there’s no optical image stabilization.
Similarly to its photomode, the primary camera of the Hot 10T shoots videos that have plenty of sharpness and detail in well-lit environments. It does, however, suffer from rapid changes in exposure, because of the way the video software handles autofocus and exposure correction – there is no way to manually adjust these settings from the included software.
There are however many compensating AI-managed features–like eye tracking autofocus, short video creation and portrait beautification. (continued next week)
