Infinix Hot 10 Unboxing, Quick Review: Another Solid Budget Option?

Early verdict: The Infinix Hot 10 brings a relatively powerful processor and big battery to the budget market, though a less than ideal display and bloatware mar the experience.

The Infinix Hot 10 is priced at Php 6,990.

Pros

Fairly powerful processor for the price
Big battery
Good design
Big display

Cons

Plenty of bloatware
No wide-angle camera
Only the main shooter is useful, rest are gimmicks

Infinix is closing out the year by offering their most compelling budget phone yet. The Hot 10 has a relatively powerful MediaTek processor along with a big battery, making it a solid budget phone to have, at least on paper.

Packaging

The Infinix Hot 10 comes in a green box with the name of the phone proudly displayed in front, along with the storage capacity and the processor used.

Opening the box, you’ll see the phone, charger, USB cable, headphones, and a soft silicone case – standard fare for most budget phones nowadays.

Design and display

The Infinix Hot 10 sports a mostly plastic design in different colorways, with our review unit coming in gloss blue.

The plastic chassis looks good, though that glossy exterior becomes an annoying smudged mess as soon as you start handling the phone, which is expected for phones in this price range.

There’s a rectangular camera module on the upper left side of the rear, as well as a fingerprint scanner set slightly below it.

The phone’s edges are curved, and we like the fact that the camera module is level with the back.

The power and volume rocker are on the right side of the phone, while the 3.5mm jack, charging port and speaker grille are all located at the bottom. Sadly, the phone still uses the aging (and fast becoming obsolete) micro USB port for charging and data transfer.

The phone sports a larger than average 6.78-inch display, though the resolution is capped at HD+. The bezels around said display is a little thick for our tastes, but are completely in line for a phone in the Hot 10’s price range.

Display quality is so-so, and you can really tell the lower resolution of the panel VS a full HD+ one, for example.

Camera

The Hot 10 uses a quad-camera setup, but most of the cameras past the main shooter feel superfluous and put in purely so the brand can claim to have a quad-cam in their budget phone.

Aside from the 16-megapixel main sensor, the rest of the cameras don’t look or feel useful. There are a 2-megapixel depth sensor, 2-megapixel macro shooter, and a QVGA camera that’s of dubious value. We would have preferred a second wide-angle camera in place of the three other cameras – that would have proved to be more useful.

Performance and battery

The Infinix Hot 10 uses a MediaTek Helio G70 processor which is fairly powerful considering its price.

In fact, putting its synthetic numbers beside the Snapdragon-powered POCO M3, you can see that the Helio G70 is trading blows closely here. Both phones have 4GB of RAM and have 128GB variants.

The phone ships with Infinix’s own UI dubbed XOS 7, running on top of Android 10. XOS 7 looks a lot like the other custom UIs that we’ve seen other Chinese brands run before, which may or may not be to your liking, depending on how you like your Android.

Unfortunately, the UI also comes with plenty of bloatware pre-installed. The pre-installed bloatware ranges from games to utilities, all of which take up precious space in the phone.

As for the battery, the phone has a 5,200mAh battery inside of it, which is more than enough to last you an entire day.

You will have to wait for a fair bit to charge the phone from 0 to 100% though as there’s no fast charging tech on tap here.

Wrap-up and early conclusions

The Infinix Hot 10 has plenty to offer thrifty buyers, though you also have to live with a few less than ideal features.

The processor package and the large battery are certainly great additions in its price point, though the less than ideal camera setup and bloatware-ridden UI isn’t the best.

Ultimately the Php 6,990 price point is good enough for a device like this, especially considering you’re getting 4GB of RAM and 128GB of expandable storage.