Infinix Zero 30 5G review: impresses on multiple fronts, falls short on a few

Name: Infinix Zero 30
Item: Infinix Zero 30
Rating: 7.5
Author: Shekhar Thakran

Published On: September 28, 2023

Review Summary

Expert Rating
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7.5/10

Infinix recently launched GT 10 Pro, a unique offering for its price range as this was a phone made from top to bottom to appeal to gamers. As I said in my review at the time, with robust performance and capable hardware, the GT 10 Pro stood out from the crowd. This is especially why I thought that with the brand’s all-new Zero 30 5G, it would be hard to follow suit as this phone is not made with a specific audience in mind and there are several other brands with solid offerings competing in this price belt. However, I stand corrected, as Zero 30 5G is one of the better mid-range phones I have tried in recent times and the phone surprisingly exceeded my expectations on multiple fronts. To find out whether buying the Zero 30 5G makes sense for you or not, read my detailed review.

Table of Contents

Verdict

Infinix Zero 30 5G comes with a crisp 144Hz curved AMOLED display that is a delight to use while watching movies or playing games. The Zero 30 allows users to record videos in 4K resolution at 60fps from both front and rear cameras, an ability that will surely fetch interest from budding social media influencers. Having said all this, the phone’s low-light camera performance from the front camera is not up to mark and Infinix promises only one major OS upgrade, which is far from ideal. Overall, the phone ticks most of the crucial boxes and can be an ideal fit for many.

Design and display

The first thing I noticed about the Zero 30 when I held it in hand was how sleek it was. At just 7.9mm in thickness, this phone slips into the pocket with ease. One of the concerns I usually have with sleek phones is that I am constantly worried about how sturdy they are and whether they can survive regular wear and tear or not. On top of the sleek frame, the phone also features a curved display, which further put me in doubt. To allay these concerns, I tried to perform a casual bend test on the phone. Keep in mind that I didn’t go full JerryRigEverything on it but the phone came across as extremely rigid and well-built during this test.

I received the Rome Green variant of the phone, which features a textured leather-like finish at the back. Considering how this phone doesn’t have flat sides due to the curved nature of the display, having a back panel that was not slippery was a godsend. While I’m still talking about the back panel, I would like to point out that the protruding camera sensors at the back do make the phone wobble when you keep it flat on your desk or table. However, this has been the case with most phones lately and a suitable case will easily fix this for you. While the phone has a tall frame, I never felt like it was hard to carry around or use with one hand.

Moving to the front, you get a 6.7-inch FHD+ (2,400×1080 pixels) 3D curved AMOLED display with up to 144Hz refresh rate. While I’ve heard many people say that they are not able to tell the difference between standard and high refresh rate panels, I can assure you that if you’re using a 60Hz panel phone right now, the butter-smooth display on the Zero 30 would definitely make you feel the difference. The phone lets you switch the refresh rate of the panel between three options – 60Hz, 120Hz, and 144Hz. You also get the option to automatically switch the refresh rate on the basis of your use case but unlike an LTPO display where this refresh rate can fluctuate dynamically, you will only get the switch between these three options here. The AMOLED panel does a great job at handling blacks and as you might expect, the vibrant panel does a great job at showcasing multimedia content. The display offers a peak brightness of 950 nits, which ensures a decent viewing even outdoors under direct sunlight.

Although the phone’s bezels are relatively thick by modern standards, its curved nature prevents the thick borders from ever becoming a major issue. As you get a hole-punch cutout at the front for a selfie camera, the Zero 30 manages to offer a 92.7 per cent screen-to-body ratio. Thanks to this, you get a rather immersive viewing experience with this phone.

Cameras

Although I traditionally start by talking about the rear cameras for most phones, in Zero 30’s case, I’ll make an exception. This is because the handset offers the ability to record 4K 60fps videos with its ’50MP AF Vlog Camera’ at the front. As most flagships don’t even offer this feature and many of you might be considering this phone for this particular feature, it makes sense to start things here. I found the videos captured via the front camera to be detailed and even colour-accurate to a certain extent. However, this is true only when you have ample lighting available. If you try to record videos at night or in other low-light scenarios, you will get a grainy output that will be helped by neither the high resolution nor the higher frames per second. As far as still photos are concerned, I faced minor issues with the edge detection in portrait mode but apart from that, the phone produced some decent stills.

Now let’s talk about the rear cameras. The 108MP primary camera on the handset comes with an f/1.7 aperture and PDAF + OIS support. The phone additionally ships with a 13MP ultrawide sensor and a 2MP tertiary sensor. While I liked the pictures clicked from the main sensor, I found that even the 108MP camera didn’t click exceptionally detailed shots. On zooming in, even the objects that were not so far away saw some loss in detail that you would typically not expect from a high-resolution sensor. While the middle part of the frame looks largely crisp, there was a noticeable lack of details as you move towards the edges.

The videos shot from the rear camera were good in terms of quality but if you are planning to shoot these videos while on the move, you should know that the videos will turn out to be slightly shaky. Despite the presence of OIS, in my testing, I found the videos shot with the phone’s primary camera setup to be unstable.

Performance and software

The Zero 30 ships with the MediaTek Dimensity 8020 chipset with an octa-core CPU (four 2.6 GHz Cortex-A78 super cores and four 2.0 GHz Cortex-A55 performance cores) and an Arm Mali-G77 MC9 GPU. The Dimensity 8020 SoC handles multitasking fairly easily and with up to 21GB RAM (12GB built-in + 9GB extended RAM) at my disposal, I didn’t face any sort of performance issues, irrespective of how many apps I had open in a single session. As far as gaming performance is concerned, I played Call of Duty Mobile on the phone and again, didn’t experience any sorts of lags or frame drops during my gaming session. As the phone comes with a vapour chamber cooling system, comprising 11 layers of cooling material, I didn’t face any heating issues during or post my gaming sessions either.

Coming to the benchmarks, the phone managed to score 706479 on AnTuTu, which is one of the highest among the phones we have tested in this price range. On Geekbench 6, the phone got a 993 single-core score and a multi-core score of 3355. These scores are also impressive for the phone’s asking price.

On the software front, the handset ships with XOS V13.1.0 and you get a few pre-installed apps out of the box, which can either bother you a lot or not at all, depending on your preferences. If you’ve used XOS before, you’ll feel right at home with features such as Game Mode, XClone, and Lightning Multi-Window. The brand has also introduced a chatGPT-powered AI assistant named ‘Folax’ that does its job really well. As this assistant is powered by one of the best AI tools in the industry, it does an excellent job at understanding context and responding to your queries, however, for certain tasks (like playing music) it might show a prompt to download certain apps. Overall, I found Folax to be a capable AI assistant.

For security, apart from the in-display fingerprint sensor (which works reliably), you also get an interesting feature called Peak Proof that lets you hide parts of the display to offer you better privacy even when you’re in a crowded situation. In my usage, I found this feature to be more gimmicky than actually helpful.

The biggest pain point with the Zero 30 comes in the form of software support as Infinix offers a promise of just one major OS upgrade and 2 years of security updates. In comparison, most other brands in this price range offer at least two OS upgrades and three years of security updates. If Infinix can improve on this front, users will feel more confident about buying the phone.

We performed the Airtel 5G+ test in Gurgaon on the Zero 30 5G and these were the results:

Battery life and charging speed

With a 5,000mAh battery capacity and 68W fast-charging support, the Zero 30 5G falls in the category of phones that have to be recharged by the end of the day after fully charging in the morning, especially if you use the display at 144Hz. If you use the phone at a lower refresh rate, you will likely last beyond a day. However, as the charging speed offered here is quite fast, the whole process doesn’t seem as arduous as it does for certain other phones.

In our PCMark battery test, the phone lasted for 12 hours and 37 minutes with the ‘Automatic-switch Refresh rate’ option enabled. With the display refresh rate set at 60Hz, you can achieve even better results. The phone managed to charge from 0-100% per cent in less than an hour, which is particularly impressive as well.

Final verdict

Infinix Zero 30 5G impresses on multiple fronts as it comes with an amazing design, brilliant display, and a capable processor. However, it does present issues in camera performance, particularly in low-light situations. On top of this, the brand offers just a year of software support for the phone, which is disappointing as otherwise, this phone is brimming with potential. Overall, this phone is a worthy buy for most people with a budget below Rs 25,000. The handset will be competing against the likes of the OnePlus Nord CE3 5G (review) and iQOO Z7 Pro (review) in this price category. While these other handsets also have their own strong aspects, the Zero 30 5G looks like a solid offering, to say the least.