The Infinix Zero X Pro is a premium Android phone with a budget price. The catch is that you might not be able to get your hands on it easily in the U.S. Infinix is currently focused on emerging markets and we’ll be the first to say that’s too bad. Zero X is a beautiful blend of design, tech, and features. The edge-to-edge 6.67” AMOLED screen boasts a 120hz refresh rate and floats on top of a beautiful outer space-themed design. The phone doubles down on camera technology and capability featuring an insane 108MP camera with 60X zoom and optical image stabilization, plus many more camera surprises.
Screen & Form
Zero X has a large edge-to-edge 6.67″ AMOLED display with a hole-punch camera hole. The faces are flat and the corners are round. There’s no curved glass and we like that! It’s 7.8mm thin and weighs 6.8oz. It’s a fairly standard design that’s well implemented. For such a large screen it doesn’t feel oversized in our hands (but we do have large hands!). The back of the phone is the stand-out feature — a two-layered raised camera overlaid on top of a not-so-subtle starry night glass finish that’s dark blue and sparkly. There’s also starry silver and tuscany brown available. It’s glass-on-glass and feels high quality and plenty durable.
The screen is beautiful and we can’t get enough of AMOLED and its inky blacks and deep contrast. The resolution is FHD+ 1080×2400. It also features a high refresh rate of 120hz. This makes for noticeably smoother transitions and scrolling. You can choose between the smoother 120hz, the standard 60hz, or an intelligent auto. I like the optionality and quicker refresh rate, but didn’t find 120hz adds all that much to the experience. 120hz is a bit over-rated, but still nice to have.
Cameras
Infinix really put a lot into making this a camera-focused phone, and it shows. We were impressed with the speed, quality, and optionality of the cameras. They even added little touches like a front-facing flash that you can adjust the brightness of. That supports a very respectable 16MP front-facing camera. The camera app has a handful of modes: video, short video, beauty, portrait, super night, AR shot, wide selfie, slow motion, pro, panorama, documents, super macro, time-lapse, super moon, and the default AI cam. As you can tell, some of the modes are gimmicky, but everything works as you’d expect. Super Macro can shoot from a distance of 2.5mm. Super moon can actually capture details of the moon. 99% of the time we’re bouncing between AI Cam, Video, and Portrait. If you have the time you can shoot in pro mode with finer tuned settings.
The Zero X Pro has a 108MP OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) camera, an 8MP “moonshot” lens with 5X optical zoom and 60X “hybrid zoom”, and an 8MP ultra-wide and macro lens. There’s a Quad-LED flash. Photos are fast, clear, crisp, and vibrant. The auto-focus is also very fast. The “AI” helps take portraits very quickly, though I found portraits were hit or miss especially with moving subjects. While the experience and photos are different than my iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 13 pro, the actual photo quality is impressively on-par. During side-by-side comparisons I found that Infinix was usually had a bit more contrast and brightness than iPhone, but this was not always the case. While I’d choose iPhone over Zero X Pro, I’d be really happy if Zero X Pro was the camera I always have available. Also, the Zero X Pro was noticeably better with extreme zoom shots.
Battery
There’s a non-removable 4500mAh battery that will easily get you through the day. It’s rated to play video for 19 hours straight or game for 10 hours. With minimal use we can get multiple days of use out of it. It can actually survive for 27 days on standby. It charges with USB-C and can fast-charge 40% in 15 minutes. One annoying kicker is that there’s no wireless charging, but this is forgivable at this price-point. It comes with a 45W charger and USB-A to USB-C cable.
Android and usability
Zero X Pro operates on a skinned version of Android 11 called XOS. The operating system is beautiful and usable, but might take some finagling to get right…. especially if you’re not used to Android. There’s a bunch of Infinix apps and features that didn’t add much for us, but also didn’t get in the way. We did really like the space-themed animated transitions and wallpapers.
A bunch of the included XOS add-ons are really just apps, but there are a few that caught our eye. There’s a Game Zone app that allows you to uniquely configure your phone to optimize for gaming and acts as a launcher for all your games. It also includes a slide-put assistant panel during gameplay. Similarly, there’s a video assistant application that offers functionality while allowing you to enjoy a full-screen video.
After going through all the settings and playing with different options like gestures and security you’ll get a good feel for the usability and features. Like any Android, there’s fantastic personalization available. Nicely, it offers both Face ID and Touch ID to unlock the phone, and even at the same time. The touch is even embedded behind the screen. They can both be a little finicky at times, especially touch. Touch takes a good second or so to work, so it’s on the slow side. Face works very fast, almost always.
Additional specs and features
There’s 8GB of RAM, 128GB (optional 256GB) of storage, and a micro-SD card slot for expandable storage. The micro-SD card actually fits into an insert that can also store two SIM cards, making this a dual-SIM phone. There’s a MediaTek Helio G95, built for efficiency and gaming. The processor has 8 cores and is plenty fast, but is considered mid-tier and doesn’t support 5G. A few other notable features: there’s a headphone jack included, there’s even headphones included and a phone case. There’s only a single speaker on the bottom of the phone. It gets loud, but is a bit tinny.
Is Infinix Zero X Pro a good phone?
If it wasn’t clear, we’re impressed with Infinix Zero X Pro and are bummed it’s not available in the US. The physical device is beautiful, and Infinix did a fine job of snazzing it up with the starry night theme. The screen and camera are winning features that we’d like to see on all phones. The usability with Android 11 is great, and while we’d prefer a stock version of Android, the skinned XOS is more-or-less fine. Having both face unlock and an embedded fingerprint scanner is another winning strategy, although the finger unlock needs to be faster. Now the drawbacks we noticed… there’s no 5G, there’s no wireless charging, there’s no eSim for a virtual sim card (but there is dual sim), and of course the availability. Finally, the price, for $300-400 we think this phone is a steal. There’s also a non-pro model and a Zero X Neo model if you want to scrap a few features and save a few bucks.