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Infinix Hot 10S Review: Best Budget Gaming Phone!

Infinix Hot 10S

Infinix Mobile launches a new budget smartphone the Infinix Hot 10S which features a large 90Hz HD+ display, MediaTek Helio G85 chipset, and a massive 6,000mAh battery with a safe charge feature.

Infinix Hot 10S

The Infinix Hot 10S is the brand's latest budget smartphone, and the company wants customers to have more options when it comes to inexpensive smartphones, which are currently dominated by manufacturers like Xiaomi, realme, and Cherry Mobile. We were fortunate to get a sample unit, and this is my firsthand review.

Infinix Hot 10S Specs:

Android 11, XOS 7.6
6.82-inch HD+ IPS display 1640 x 720 resolution, at 263ppi
90Hz refresh rate, 180Hz touch sampling
2.0GHz MediaTek Helio G85 octa-core processor
Mali-G52 MC2 GPU
4GB/6GB RAM
64GB/128GB internal storage
Expandable via microSD up to 512GB
48MP f/1.8, PDAF + 2MP depth sensor + AI rear cameras, Quad-LED flash
8MP selfie camera
Rear-mounted fingerprint scanner
Headphone jack
Dual SIM, Dual standby
4G LTE
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band
Bluetooth 5.0
GPS, A-GPS
FM Radio
micro-USB
Colors: Heart of Ocean, Morandi Green, Purple, Black
6,000mAh battery, 10W charger

Hot 10S Design and Built
The Infinix Hot 10S comes in four colors: Morandi Green, Heart of Ocean, 7 Degree Purple, and 95 Degree Black, which is the color of my review unit.

Infinix Hot 10S

It has a polycarbonate back with a diamond patterned design and glossy surface which is a smudge and fingerprint magnet. Fortunately, it also comes with a free case to protect it from scratches. It's a big phone with a length of 171.5mm and a width of 77.5mm, yet it's still easy to grasp and operate with one hand.

Infinix Hot 10S

The Hot 10S sports a triple camera system with an LED flash on the back, a fingerprint reader that unlocks the phone quickly, and Infinix branding on the bottom.

The power button and volume rocker are on the right side, while the SIM slot has a triple tray that supports two 4G nano-SIM cards and one microSD card with a storage capacity of 512GB.

Infinix Hot 10S

The micro-USB connector is at the bottom, flanked by the 3.5mm audio jack, microphone, and loudspeaker. It's a little disappointing that Infinix employs the older micro-USB connector rather than the much superior Type-C connection.

Overall, I think the Hot 10S is a well-designed and well-built device. It is not a slim phone, but it is still easy to carry on pants and use daily.

Hot 10S Display
A huge 6.82-inch HD+ IPS panel with 1640 × 720 pixel resolution and 263-pixel density sit in the foreground. It offers a 90Hz refresh rate for a smooth display and a 180Hz touch sampling rate for accurate touchpoint and quick motions, which is useful when playing action-packed games.

Infinix Hot 10S

Despite its large size, there are no out-of-place pixels, the colors are vibrant, and the brightness is adequate to use it outside during the day, but not when the sun is shining strongly. The viewing angle is also not that wide, it seems to darken when tilted to the side and bottom.

Infinix Hot 10S

The display supports Adaptive Brightness, Eye Care, Dark Theme, Ultra Touch, and Screen refresh rate of 90Hz for a smoother experience.

It has a setting where users can choose between 90Hz, 60Hz, or the Auto switch refresh rate. I opted to use the 90Hz option to test its features and battery life, but for everyday use, it's better to use the Auto switch refresh rate to save battery power.

Performance - MediaTek Helio G85
Under the hood, the Hot 10S packs a MediaTek Helio G85 chipset clocked at 2.0GHz, paired with Mali-G52 MC2 for graphics, a 6GB RAM, 128GB of storage, and a massive 6,000mAh battery.

Infinix Hot 10S

The MediaTek Helio G85 CPU with Arm Mali-G52 GPU up to a 1GHz peak is ideal for gaming with its octa-core CPU, which features two powerful Arm Cortex-A75 CPUs operating up to 2GHz and six Cortex-A55 processors operating up to 1.8GHz, interlinked by a large L3 cache for improved gaming performance. It's the same processor that can be found on realme Narzo 30A.

Infinix Hot 10S Benchmark performance

Infinix Hot 10S

In terms of gaming performance, the Helio G85 Chipset excels in popular online games like Call of Duty, Mobile Legends, and other online games. Playing Call of Duty is excellent; it supports medium graphics quality and a high frame rate, resulting in seamless gameplay with little latency. Having a large display, such as the Hot 10S, is advantageous while playing games, particularly shooting games and other action-packed games because there are more details and it is simpler to hit the target.

Infinix Hot 10S

The Hot 10S also features Game Mode, which helps improve the gaming experience, another cool feature of the XOS is the Game Anti-Addiction, with this parents can monitor thier children's gaming behavior and sets the Kids Mode to guide them towards healthy digital habits.

XOS 7.6
The Hot 10S runs on XOS Dolphin v7.6.0 based n Android 11, the UI is simple and flipping between pages of apps is smooth and fast. It has XTheme the theme store, where a lot of themes, wallpaper available for download for free and new designs are added weekly.

Infinix Hot 10S

It includes a lot of pre-installed bloatware as well as XOS-specific apps and utilities. One such software is Phone Boost, which allows you to free up memory and quit apps that are running in the background to conserve data and battery life. It can also be used to quickly uninstall programs and clear up temporary files to free up more space.

Other notable features of XOS are Split Screen, Image Compressor, Power Boost, and Social Turbo. It also comes with some pre-installed apps such as Facebook, and other OSX apps and tools.

Cameras

The Hot 10S is equipped with a triple camera that comprises a 48-megapixel main lens, a 2-megapixel depth sensor, and an AI lens with LED flash. There is an 8-megapixel selfie camera on the front with an f/2.0 aperture and dual-LED flash.

Infinix Hot 10S

The camera app supports different shooting modes such as short video, video, AI cam (photo), beauty, portrait, and super night modes, it also has AR shot, slow-motion, panorama, time-lapse and it can documents.

Infinix Hot 10S

Its default image size is 4:3 and uses only 12-megapixel, however, there is a button at the top of the screen to activate the 48-megapixel sensor. For video, it's capable of 2K, 1080p, 720p video recording, while the slow-mo supports 120 fps and 240 fps.


Pictures shot with the primary camera during the day with a lot of lighting look really nice with good details and decent colors, but it's not consistent for example, the colors of the flower are not even near to what it truly looks like, but other times it came out really lovely. The images in night mode appear more saturated than typical, with some details lost and the images appearing a little mushy.

Battery Life
This phone is packed with a massive 6000mAh battery with a 10W charger which is sadly not a fast charger, Infinix should have at least included an 18W charger for faster charging of the battery.

Infinix Hot 10S

With one full charge, we were able to get approximately two days of screen time, which included surfing and updating social media accounts, watching movies on Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix, playing games, doing some research, and playing more games.

Charging the battery is a bit disappointing using its micro-USB port and the 10W charger, it took more than 3 hours to fully charge the battery from 3% to 100% capacity.

Battery charging is somewhat disappointing because it still uses the old USB port and a 10W charger, it took nearly 3 hours for a battery charge to be completely charged from 3 %to 100% percent.

Pros

Huge screen
High refresh rate
Good design
Nice quality built
Better performance
Massive battery capacity
Long battery life
Loudspeaker
Decent camera

Cons
Plastic body
Camera could be better in night mode
Uses micro-USB
Slow charging

Verdict
The Infinix Hot 10S is the new budget king smartphone that is packed with nice features priced at only ₱6,990 for the 6GB+128GB variant. It offers a fantastic large display with a 90Hz refresh rate, great for media consumption, and playing games. Performance is also great and can run any games that are available in Google Play. The camera can capture good photos in daylight but suffer quality when used in dim places but can be remedied by using the LED flash. Overall we enjoy using this phone as our main device for our digital everyday life, and the battery life is impressive.

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