The Infinix Hot 4 review: The best budget smartphone you can buy in Uganda

The Infinix Hot 4 is a budget smartphone commanding a paltry UGX 359,000 on Kilimall. As with our first impressions, this price affords a plastic slab with a 5.5-inch IPS HD screen, a fast fingerprint scanner, a good camera, a modest selfie shooter, a 4000mAh battery, and a pair of earphones, and so on and so forth.

The most compelling blessing of the Hot 4 is the incorporated fingerprint scanner at a price point yet to be matched by the competition. It being a budget smartphone, it came with a few compromises like the plastic build, a lower-res screen ( 1280×720), a moderate camera so as to keep the price point as low as possible. Nevertheless, these played well for an awesome experience especially from such a phone for this budget.

Specifications

Hardware

The Infinix Hot 4 is an all-plastic smartphone, front, and back. The front 5.5 Inch screen is plastic with the 5MP selfie shooter, an earpiece, and capacitive old-school Android keys. The removable textured back houses the 8MP rear shooter with LED flash, fingerprint, and stereo speakers. It also keeps covers the non-removable 4000mAh battery, dual micro SIM slots and an expandable MicroSD card slot.

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The plastic rail has the Micro USB port and the mouthpiece at the bottom while the 3.5mm headphone jack sits at the top.

Display

Surprisingly we liked the 5.5-inch HD screen. It required no extra effort in manning the phone unlike its larger 6-inch Note 3 phablet, which you can’t navigate with a single hand. Colors are vivid, it shone even in the brightest of conditions even with its negligible  267dpi compared to other budget line handsets.

Software

Hardware can’t play well on its own and this is why the XOS Chameleon V2 based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow comes at play. It powers the Hot 4 as the case with other Infinix handsets like the Note 3.

Infinix threw in its X suite bloatware together with the Google staples. The software played well and was intuitive albeit the cheap hardware. The other good thing is that Infinix offers OTA updates and surrenders customization to the hands of its phone users. These allow you to tweak notifications, change themes, and download fonts among others though there are brazen similarities with the HiOS overlay that powers Tecno smartphones.

Camera

The rear 8MP camera is okay depending on the shooting environs. Well-lit surroundings give the best of shots though they appear plasticky while dim-lit environments are no better than average. The 5MP selfie shooter is mediocre and is annoyingly defaulted in beauty mode, which might otherwise hoodwink you into thinking it is as stellar as the word itself yet it is all artificial. Toggling it into the normal mode will be accompanied by second thoughts about the quality of selfies in contrast with the default mode.

Performance

This was per my expectations. It is delivered helped by the native performance management app that allows you to toggle through different performance modes based on tasks at hand.

It was able to handle all casual titles thrown its way without hiccups on top of other tabs being open. A myriad of notifications, email, power resourceful chrome, and Twitter among others played well, and switching between them was okay.

Battery

The Infinix Hot 4 is well optimized to manage resource-hungry tasks and doing background checks on who is eating the largest chunk of system resources and in the process draining the battery the most. It then helps you deactivate such tasks, translating into extended battery life.

The battery can last a full day without charge but this is dependent on usage. Heavy users will drain it on their 6th hour while moderate users can last a day without asking around who has a micro USB cable that they charge.

Stuff we liked

• Finger Print scanner
• Battery

Stuff we don’t like

• Camera