Infinix has been releasing a series of budget phones into the Kenyan market over the past few months. And the latest release is the Infinix Hot 8, which comes in 4 colors; Quetzal Cyan, Cosmic Purple, Milan Black and Berlin Grey. For my review unit, I have the cosmic purple.

On the first glance, the Infinix Hot 8 looks like one of the generic-looking budget phones available in the market with a water drop notch. It bears a fresh gradient design on its rear panel, triple rear cameras, an entry-level MediaTek processor, and a large battery.

The Infinix Hot 8 has its ear piece located right above the water drop notch, and a little bit on the left there is a led flashlight that goes on when charging and doesn’t act as a notification bell. The speaker is located on the bottom left of the screen which produces good quality sound and is loud enough. The bottom right holds the earphone jack and at the center is a USB charging port. The power and volume button are located on the right hand of the screen, they offer a click sound and can be easily accessed. On the left side of the screen there is a 3-in-1 (dual Nano-SIM + microSD) tray.

Infinix always try to keep up with the trends or be part of the trend makers when it comes to giving their customers fresh designs and color finishes. The rear panel of our Cosmic Purple Infinix Hot 8 has a dark purple shade that fades from black to purple going downwards. It has a glossy surface that has a shiny finish.  The rare panel also holds the triple rare camera and the finger print sensor.

The Infinix Hot 8 offers a very cute design but unfortunately the rare panel is made up of flimsy material that easily smudges and leaves finger print marks everywhere. Fortunately, Infinix realized this shortcoming and provides a very stylish transparent protective case in the retail box. The Infinix Hot 8 offers a comfortable grip but can easily slide off your hands if not careful. You should be ready to wear pants with deep pockets as it’s quite tall. We advise you use the phone with the cover.

The Infinix Hot 8 packs a 6.52-inch HD+ (720×1600 pixels) display with a 20:9 aspect ratio and 90.3 percent screen-to-body ratio. It has a brightness of 450 nits and produces decent colors. Watching YouTube videos and Netflix series on the device was an okay experience and the brightness was good enough even under direct sunlight. If you are not a fun of bright light you might find the brightness to be too much but you can choose to use the eye care option available in the device. The display of the Infinix Hot 8 is pretty decent and is one of the best we have seen at this price range. 

This device is powered by the octa-core MediaTek Helio P22 SoC clocked at 2.0GHz, paired with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, which can be expanded up to 256GB using a microSD card. Infinix has made this phone available in two variants. Infinix Hot 8(4G) that has a starting price of KES 10,699 and the Hot 8 lite (3G) that has a starting price of KES 9,699.

The Infinix Hot series are known for providing a great battery life to its customers and the Infinix Hot 8 promises just that with its 5,000mAh battery. We put the Infinix Hot 8 battery life to the test and we were impressed at its capability to maintain power. We did a day long internet connection while switching between social media apps, played casual game such as candy crush and piano tiles, watched an episode of How To Get Away with Murder and some YouTube videos, and listed to music for a couple of hours. The battery easily went past a day. An HD video battery loop test was also performed on the phone and it lasted for 17 hours and 21 minutes.

The Infinix Hot 8 uses the MediaTek Helio P22 processor that provides a decent performance if you stick to the basics. This phone is ideal for an individual who is not a heavy phone user and doesn’t change between apps often. We found the device to be a bit sluggish when multiple apps running on the background but it’s not something you can’t learn to live with.

The Infinix Hot 8 runs on a custom skin called XOS 5.0, based on Android Pie 9. It offers a user interface that is quite similar to most Infinix phones. It has the multi-window bar, reading mode, WhatsApp mode and game mode which are available in most Infinix phones. The Infinix Hot 8 comes preinstalled with numerous apps such as XTheme, XClub, AI Gallery, AHA Games and Vskit, some of these apps cannot be uninstalled.

The Infinix Hot 8 on the rear packs a 13-megapixel primary camera with an f/1,8 aperture and a second 2-megapixel camera. It sports an 8-megapixel camera on the front for selfies, with an f/2.0 aperture. The photo quality is decent and there is nothing out of the expected. The phones camera works best under direct sunlight, pictures appear more vibrant. Indoor photos, especially those in low light conditions, looked grainy and had a lot of noise with muted colors and minimal sharpness. 

The camera app contains different modes such as video, AI Cam, Beauty, and Bokeh. You can easily shift between modes by swiping left or right. While shifting between modes, we quickly realized that the shutter button becomes unresponsive for a while. Surprisingly the Infinix Hot 8 can’t capture photos in the 16:9 aspect ratio. But we were impressed with beauty mode as it does not oversaturate the colors of objects, and produced natural-looking results. When it comes to close-up shots, the Infinix Hot 8 punched well above its weight and produced crisp photos with a decent amount of surface detail and sharp edges. 

Whether to buy or not to buy the Infinix Hot 8 all depends on what you want in a device. If you want a budget phone that can perform daily tasks, has a decent camera with a great battery life, this is your ideal phone. But if you are looking to have a device that allows heavy browsing and playing heavy games this device will disappoint you. You can get the Infinix Hot 8 here, they promise to give you a great deal.

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