Hong Kong-based manufacturer Infinix, owned by Transsion Holdings has launched its first affordable pop-up selfie smartphone – Infinix S5 Pro at a price tag of Rs. 9,999. With Infinix S5 Pro, the company has upped its game in the oversaturated budget segment in the Indian market and the key highlights of the S5 Pro are motorized pop-up camera sensor, a pixel-dense full-screen HD+ notch-less display, interesting design language, three rear cameras, 4000mAh battery, and some interesting features. All of these features might sound new, but for the segment, one does not see them being offered by any manufacturer like Samsung, Xiaomi Redmi phones, Realme, Vivo and OPPO.
Infinix S5 Pro comes with promising hardware at very competitive price points and it is enough to make a long-lasting impression on consumers? We have been using the S5 Pro for a month and here’s our detailed review.
Infinix S5 Pro Detailed Review
Unboxing the Infinix S5 Pro
The Infinix S5 Pro retail box contains the smartphone, transparent soft case, SIM ejection pin, 10W charger and a microUSB cable. There’s also a thin screen protector underneath and a bunch of leaflets.
Infinix S5 Pro Design
The Infinix S5 Pro is available in two colour options – Forest Green and Violet. We got the Forest Green for the review and it gives a distinct look, it is too bright too shiny. The Infinix S5 Pro is a good looking device that does not feel cheap from any angle, the frame and rear panel are made of plastic and the back panel offers a glossy finish that has a mirror-like finish, extremely reflective, attracts fingerprints and some smudges. Thankfully, the phone is not slippery and the rear panel is curved on all four sides and meets the frame without creating any sharp edges. The phone is comfortable to hold in your hand and the one-handed operation is not possible with this smartphone.
On the front, the Infinix S5 Pro comes with a fullscreen display without any notch or dot design, thanks to the pop-up selfie camera. It goes up and down automatically every time when you open and closes the selfie mode from within the camera app. The front camera withstands 150,000 lifts which translates to 50 cycles each day for over eight years and during our usage we noticed that the dust easily accumulates around the pop-up module. On the rear side, the rear camera module doesn’t feature the usual design that places camera sensors placed one after the other vertically and creates a large bump, making the phone wobble when placed on a flat surface. If you use the case that comes with the device then it will take care of the wobbling.
The primary camera has a special spot and the other two camera sensors surround with the dual-flash LED lights, sits right in the centre of the two camera sensors. There’s a fingerprint sensor on the centre of the back panel and it’s a hit or miss when it comes to accuracy.
On the right side, the Infinix S5 Pro features volume controls and power on/off buttons, which are quite easy to reach while on the left side, there’s a triple card slot where you insert two nano-SIM cards and one microSD card.
On the bottom, there’s a 3.5mm audio jack, a microphone, microUSB port and a speaker grille while on the top there’s a pop-up selfie mechanism.
Display
On the front, The Infinix S5 Pro display features a 6.53-inch IPS LCD Full View Full HD+ display with a resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels and has an impressive 91.2 percent screen-to-body ratio, thanks to the pop-up camera and thin bezels. The display is quite bright, offers good viewing angle with decent colour management and it is usable in outdoor conditions or there is no sunlight booster, thanks to the 480nits brightness for it. The panel has no hole or cutout and the 91 percent screen-to-body ratio provides a seamless viewing experience and you will enjoy watching movies or playing games on this screen.
There is no information on the maker of the screen and if you’re concerned for scratches or cracks then the company has provided a screen protector. Despite the Full-HD+ display, the device only supports the lowest Widevine CDM level – L3, which means you cannot stream HD or higher resolution content from Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or other streaming platforms. For your information, you can still use this service but they will let you consume the 480p content, depending on your network connection.
Overall, the display shows punch and saturated colours and at this price tag, the Infinix S5 Pro is offering as good as what you get in any other mid-ranger.
Software
On the software front, the Infinix S5 Pro runs on Android 10 operating system with the company’s custom user interface XOS 6.0 running on top of it, which is heavily customized. The UI is relatively smooth, comes with lots of customization options and pre-installed third-party apps, most of them can be uninstalled. The user interface comes with some interesting features like a floating window that provided shortcuts to your favourite applications and a few helpful software features as well – Dark Theme, Gesture-based Navigation, Location Controls, battery saving options, Wi-Fi sharing, Social Turbo, Smart Panel, Hide Apps, Digital Wellbeing. The Infinix S5 Pro comes with its own Gallery, Weather, Files, and FM radio apps.
There is an app drawer which makes finding and sorting apps much easier. Additionally, the moment you open the app drawer, you will see promoted as and when you open the notification panel you will find ads with AHA Games. Moreover, the Phoenix browser sends spam notifications and it will be frustrating as you will end up having more spam notifications then useful ones.
For security purpose, the Infinix S5 Pro lets you choose between the physical fingerprint sensor of Face unlock feature and work quite well keeping your smartphone secure.
Camera
Ahead of the launch, the Infinix S5 Pro camera was one of the most-talked-about features. On the rear, there’s a triple-camera setup and the setup includes a 48-megapixel primary sensor with f/1.8 aperture, 5-megapixel ultra-wide-angle sensor, and a 2-megapixel macro sensor along with dual-LED flash. There are multiple modes to choose from and it includes video, short video, AI cam, beauty, Bokeh, Panorama and AR shot. On the performance side, it was quite average and the phone does a decent job in capturing the right colours of the subject, the detailing was missing from the photos. The portrait mode does a good job while the imaged clicked in low light conditions are not that great. Overall, the rear camera quality doesn’t seem much attractive. The Infinix S5 Pro supports video recording up to 1080p at 30fps and the quality is okayish.
On the front, there’s a 16-megapixel pop-up AI Selfie camera with f/2.0 aperture and the company has promised a life span of 1,50,000 retractions and smartphone comes with automatic retraction on accidental drops. The pop-up camera module has a sound feature so whenever you open the front camera, you hear a special sound. The selfie camera does a quite average job and the AI portrait mode produce good results and there were other modes such as AI emoji, beauty, etc. there was fun to fiddle with.
Performance
Under the hood, the Infinix S5 Pro is powered by the Helio P35 MediaTek chipset based on TSMC’s 12nm FinFET process and contains an octa-core Cortex-A53 architecture (4×2.3GHz +4×1.8GHz). The Cortex-A53 architecture is behind the curve and still able to handle a lot of stuff that a normal user will throw be it accessing social media, making phone calls or playing a few games. The phone lags when you do a lot of multitasking and productivity apps running in the background. The chipset is paired with PowerVR GE8320 GPU and the device starts struggling the moment you try playing graphic-intensive games like PUBG Mobile or Asphalt9 on high settings but the casual games run fine.
However, gaming is where the MediaTek Helio P35 starts to struggle and the performance is not the strong point of this smartphone but it handles 1080p movies very well.
The S5 Pro comes with either 4GB or 6GB of RAM depending on the storage option. The memory can be further expanded with the help of a microSD card slot.
On the connectivity front, there’s support for dual 4G VoLTE, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, GLONASS, dual-SIM, microUSB port and 3.5mm audio jack.
Battery
The Infinix S5 Pro is powered by a 4,000mAh battery and there’s no support for fast charging although it supports 10W charging, the provided 5V/2A adapter charges the phone’s battery from 0 to 30% in half an hour and it takes around three hours to charge the smartphone from 0 to 100 percent. During my usage, the phone able to last for 24 hours and my usage includes making phone calls, browsing social media, watching YouTube videos, playing heavy games on it, and replying to emails.
Verdict
Infinix S5 Pro is a beautiful-looking smartphone and with a price tag of Rs. 9,999 I’m sure that it lures a lot of users. The smartphone has a few things in its favor – premium look, the pop-up selfie camera, and notch-less high-res screen offer an immersive viewing experience while it has shortcomings like middling performance, the main camera performs well in the daytime, the outdated microUSB port, a rear-mounted capacitive fingerprint sensor is not accurate, a number of bloatware ads that are not useful, and battery life is average, as it takes almost three hours to charge the 4,000 battery.
If your primary concern is style, viewing experience, fancy pop-up camera, and standing out then you can make a few compromises in terms of functionality. Still, if you want the maximum value for your money, then the Samsung Galaxy M30, Xiaomi Redmi Note 8, and Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro, and more are better.