Infinix Zero 5 Pro review: Capable camera, good battery lift this phablet

The smartphone, the first premium offering by Infinix, promises to offer value for money in terms of specifications and features

Transsion Holdings, a Hong Kong-based mobile phone manufacturer, recently launched the mid-tier Infinix Zero 5 Pro at Rs 19,999. The smartphone, the first premium offering by the company, promises to offer value for money in terms of specifications and features.

Business Standard reviewed the Infinix Zero 5 Pro to test its overall performance. Here are our observations:

Design

For a smartphone with a 6-inch screen, the Infinix Zero 5 Pro comes across as huge and with its share of avoidable design flaws. The front is dominated by a 16:9 aspect ratio screen, which leaves huge bezels on top and bottom. The fingerprint scanner, coupled with capacitive navigation keys, could have been housed below the screen to utilise the bottom bezel. Instead, the company has placed the fingerprint scanner on the back and chosen on-screen navigation keys, rendering the bottom bezel purposeless.

In terms of build quality, the Zero 5 Pro looks solid and the chamfered edges on its sides and around the fingerprint sensor give an overall premium feel to the smartphone. The antenna line on the back looks a bit too bold but does not cause any damage to the design theme.

The power button, volume rocker keys and dual-SIM card slot are housed on the right. Interestingly, the phone comes with a dedicated memory card slot – placed on the left – to expand the storage of the smartphone. The speaker grille, with microphone and USB type-C port for data transfer and charging, are placed at the bottom, along with a 3.5 mm audio port.

Display

The 5.98-inch fullHD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 aspect ratio screen works optimally. The touch is responsive enough and the display renders good contrast and saturation. However, the sunlight legibility and peak brightness levels are some downsides. Also, the display looks a little pixelated, especially while rendering text and videos.

Camera

As for the imaging capabilities of the Zero 5 Pro, the phone has a dual camera set-up on the back – a 12-megapixel wide-angle primary lens and a 13MP telephoto lens. On the front, the smartphone houses a 16MP selfie shooter.

The dual-camera set-up offers a promising image quality but the interface leaves you a little confused sometimes. The camera has the portrait mode for sharp portraits and professional mode for custom shots. The photographs come out sharp, with satisfactory details in good-light scenarios. But, the performance is sub-optimal in low-light conditions.

The selfie camera is equipped with the Bokeh mode, which allows selfies with enhanced background blurring effect. However, the focus is tricky and needs patience to get you perfect selfies with proper Bokeh effect.

Performance

The Zero 5 Pro is powered by Mediatek Helio P25 MT6757 octa-core processor, coupled with a 6GB RAM and 128 GB internal storage. The phone works smooth overall but has some lags or stutters at times. The device boots Android Nougat 7.0 covered under XOS Hummingbird v3.0 theme, which is preloaded with some bloatware and apps. The theme mostly looks clean, but is far from perfect.

Battery

The phone’s 4,350 mAh battery keeps the show running for more than a day, even on operating processor-intensive tasks like gaming, video streaming and music playback. The phone does heat up a little but not so much as might cause discomfort.

Verdict

The Zero 5 Pro is a phablet device with a satisfactory performance in the sub-Rs 20,000 price segment. The lack of an 18:9 aspect ratio screen and certain design flaws do, however, take away some crucial points. But the Zero 5 Pro can easily be considered value for money, especially considering the price. In its price segment, the phone competes with the Honor 9i, Xiaomi Mi A1 and Honor 7X.