Exclusive: The Infinix Hot 2 Review – An Affordable Mid-Range Phone for just Rs. 9,999

Infinix was able to strike deep into the smartphone market of Pakistan with the release of its Hot Note, and now, the company plans on emulating the same with its Hot 2, that is going to retail in Pakistan for Rs. 9,999 for 1GB version and Rs. 11,399 for 2GB variant. Phone is going to be available on Daraz (currently out of stock due to Black Friday sales).

Can the Hot 2 deliver the same amount of kick that the company’s previous products have delivered? We will find out in our Infinix Hot 2 review.

Infinix Hot 2: Design And Appearance

While the front side of the smartphone might look like a generic Android smartphone, the rear side tells another story. Infinix Hot 2 uses a dual-color combination, with the back side possessing a white plastic cover with several holes punctured in it, and of course, the company’s logo prominently engraved at the rear side. It’s aesthetically pleasing to say the least. Now, here is the most interesting part; Infinix Hot 2 may have purposely done this since we found that gripping the smartphone was much simpler thanks to the existence of these tiny punctured holes. They add more appeal and texture to the device, which is a definite bonus in our books.

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The Back Side

The screen is surrounded by a fair amount of bezels. Those of you with slightly larger hands will find that the device feels a wee bit thinner that what you actually expected. This is not necessarily a bad thing since after using it for a couple of hours, you will easily get used to it.

IMG_1014

The Front Side

Aesthetics is not the only factor that is required to purchase a smartphone, of course, which brings us to the next part.

Infinix Hot 2: Button Placement And Other Features

Chinese manufacturers have this habit of placing all buttons on one side and this is exactly what they have done with Infinix Hot 2. Now, it is not necessarily a bad thing but when one wants to take a screenshot, things become a bit harder. For lefties, it won’t be a problem to take a screenshot, and therein lies the issue with the button placement.

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The Volume and Power Buttons

As for the internals, we were very pleased to see that the battery is removable, which will definitely help when you are in the market looking for a replacement.

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Removable Battery

As you can see, there are two large SIM card slots present, along with a microSD card slot present on the left. While this is a very flexible setup for those who want expandable storage up to 32GB, and want to carry two numbers without actually carrying two cell phones, the only one complaint that we found that every time you need to replace the SIM or storage card (for whatever reason), you will be required to remove the battery first. While having a total of three slots is definitely a great thing to see, it would have been even better had there been a way to attach all three cards without the cumbersome removal process involved.

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The Dual Sim, MicroSD Slots, and Battery

There are three tiny speak cutouts present at the bottom, which is a decent setup, seeing as how it is a mid-ranged smartphone, and there is a combination of a charging port and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

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The Speaker Grill

Personally, we prefer this setup because when you want to use your smartphone and charge it at the same time, having a charging port at the top greatly reduces the need for a longer cable, so you can comfortably use the device and charge it at the same time, without fearing that you will yank out the cable.

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Headphone Jack and USB Charging Ports

On a side note, we were hoping to see a Type-C USB port, instead of a microUSB one, since the benefits of Type-C USB exceed its drawbacks (they are expensive to place in smartphones and their accessories are expensive as well). However, it will take a very long while for such a port to be adopted into smartphones, so it is not a big deal at all.

Infinix Hot 2: Display And Resolution

The display of Infinix Hot 2 is extremely sharp, indicating that it is an IPS type display and we will tell you why. First off, the display is brighter than most and when we change its viewing angles by tilting the smartphone, there is no color distortion, which is the obvious benefit. IPS panels have their fair share of advantages, which include being able to produce sharper images compared to Super AMOLED type displays (pixels of IPS panels are packed more closely, which is why this happens) found in Samsung devices. However, they do not possess the energy efficiency of Super AMOLED displays, but they are much cheaper than the latter, which explains why the Infinix Hot 2 carries an affordable price.

IMG_1015

The Display Screen

The resolution of the smartphone is 1280 x 720 pixels, and on an IPS type display, it looks even better thanks to its sharper attributes. If you are complaining why Infinix Hot 2 does not have a resolution of 1080p, it’s actually a good thing. 1080p displays are normally found in high-end phones and if it was present on this handset, its price would have to be increased, along with its specifications, making it a higher-priced package than the current one. Side by side, if the specifications remained the same and resolution was increased, performance and battery would also take a major hit.

Since it is merged with an IPS panel, you will see a very, very small difference when comparing it to a 1080p display, and that too if you have a keen eye for such things.

Infinix Hot 2: Interface Impressions

For its price, Infinix Hot 2 has all the necessary features to fulfill your requirements, but is its interface experience full of unneeded extras? Looks like that isn’t the case after all. The very first thing that we noticed about the smartphone when browsing the installed apps section; no bloatware. Some pre-installed apps were present which were (thankfully) removable. Best of all, we could do this without having to root the smartphone.

Screenshot_2015-11-27-06-30-12

Some Pre-Installed Apps that can be easily Removed

Infinix Hot 2 is running Android Lollipop 5.1, which begs the question; are we going to see a Marshmallow update for the smartphone in the future? Let us hope so. As far as interface performance is concerned, everything was snappy fast; apps did not struggle to open even after we quick fired several of them (this is where the presence of 2GB RAM really shined). Sure we did run into some performance issues while playing really intensive mobile games, but after all, that was expected. If you are engaged with simple mobile apps, then everything will work smooth as butter.

One thing we might add here is that there’s no capacitive buttons present on the bezels part of the screen. Instead, they are present on the screen itself, much like the Nexus lineup, which makes things much easier, particularly since they are quick to respond when being tapped upon and do not interfere when you are playing games.

Infinix Hot 2: Performance

Without going into too much detail, here are some benchmarks that we managed to run in order to give you a fair idea of how the smartphone performs in comparison to other devices.

AnTuTu_(2)

 

AnTuTu

 Geekbench

GeekBench

 

Vellamo

Vellamo

Camera samples

Here are some camera samples that we managed to take with both the rear and front sensors of Infinix Hot 2. While these are just samples, they will give you an idea on the overall image quality of both cameras.

(Click to Enlarge)

Battery Life Measurement

For most of you out there, high amount of battery life is a very crucial feature to have in a smartphone. In Infinix Hot 2, its 2,200mAh might not seem like much, but we decided to take it for a test anyway. In order to test out the smartphone, we set its screen brightness to 100 percent and performed mildly intensive tasks such as light web browsing. In this way, you will be able to experience the same scenario that mobile users face.

Given below are the results that were obtained:

Battery_time

Battery Stats

We have to say that we were quite impressed with the overall results, particularly with the standby time. 3G connectivity sucks the living daylights out of a smartphone’s battery and while we were hoping to get more juice out of the device, raking out 7 hours while connected is not bad at all.

What Features Make This Smartphone Stand Out?

Infinix Hot 2 is a great Android powered handset, especially if you are on a strict budget. There are several features that make it feel that a premium quality smartphone and we would like to point out those features right now. Additionally, we will also point out what we felt could have been added to Infinix Hot 2 in order to make it even better than before. Hopefully, the company will be reading this so that they will be able to release an even better device in the future.

Screenshot_2015-11-27-06-49-18

Smart Gestures

Things That We Liked About Infinix Hot 2

  • Terrific price to performance ratio (2GB RAM version costs Rs. 11,399 while 1GB RAM model costs Rs. 9,999)
  • Large screen size
  • IPS panel makes overall display quality appear sharp despite the lower resolution
  • Terrific battery life
  • Running Android Lollipop 5.1 (It is possible that the smartphone could receive an update for Android Marshmallow, which will result in more performance and more features)
  • Able to accept a microSD card, as well as two SIM cards
  • Interface was extremely snappy

Things That We Thought Could Have Made The Smartphone Much Better

  • Having an octa-core processor instead of a quad-core CPU (although though this would mean the overall price will increase and battery life would be reduced)
  • Support for a higher microSD storage card space
  • Having a Type-C USB port
  • LTE connectivity

Hardware Specifications

  • Chipset: MediaTek MT6580
  • Processor: Quad-core Cortex-A7 at 1.3GHz
  • RAM: 2GB
  • Memory: 16GB (supports a microSD storage card up to 32GB)
  • Battery: 2,200mAh
  • Display size: 5.0 inch
  • Screen resolution: 1280 x 720
  • Charging port type: microSIM
  • Weight: 162 grams

Final Verdict

After looking at each and every aspect of the Hot 2, we have summarized the following scores below:

  • Build Quality: 6 out of 10
  • Appearance: 7 out of 10
  • Button placement: 7 out of 10
  • Interface experience: 10 out of 10
  • Display quality: 9 out of 10
  • Price/performance ratio: 10 out of 10
  • Battery performance: 9 out of 10

There is no denying the fact that Infinix Hot 2 is an amazing smartphone when it comes to price and performance. When we first laid our eyes on the specifications, we were slightly worried about its interface performance, but as it turns out, seeing is believing. Naturally, when performing intensive tasks such as playing graphically intensive mobile games will cause performance issues in isolated cases, but for a Rs. 11,399 handset (2GB RAM version), the Hot 2 has greatly impressed us with what it delivers.

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The Contents of the Box

If you want higher performance, then we strongly recommend that you purchase the 2GB RAM model since you will get a much higher bigger performance boost for an additional Rs. 1,400.


  • Strange you didn’t mention .,, its an Android One phone and will get the latest update when available, so Android’s Marshmallow 6.0 is on the tow.

  • yeh set daraz k Black Fraud day pe kitney ka tha aur ab kitney ka hai? any change in price?

  • ADMIN The prices you have mentioned in this review ain’t valid….

    Take a look at DRAZ.PK prices….

  • I am using it and happy from the performance overall, however I found that voice quality on calls is not very good and feels distortion , not sure if it is just my set or happening with other hot2 phones or not

    • voice quality distortion is MAIN problem on All Android One MTK CPU based phones, se no to MTK processor always. I have 3 QMobile A1 all have this problem, got new Samsung J5 it is very good phone, better than Obi SF1.

  • chipset is ancient …
    lacks a bit of the ‘wow’ factor

    but decent rear camera , better than expected.

    if Infinix REALLY want to take the local market by storm , they better start implementing fingerprint sensors , 3 gb ram , dual tone flash including temperature compensation , 64 bit cpus and maybe for a very high-end but reasonably priced model , laser autofocus !

    they have potential but so far underwhelming.

  • I was ordered this phone and got it. But there phone is totally bakwas.
    Darazpk is not return but after I raise issued on social media they return my money.
    Guys buy it from shop and open in front of u instead of online.

    • How did they pay your money back? kindly guide me? I ordered Innjoo and its faulty. Sent them back for 4 times still its faulty. how to refund my money?

  • Wow, wtf did I just read? The display portion especially nearly made my eyes bulge out of my head. “The display is sharper so it must be IPS.” *facepalm* Breaking news: sharpness has nothing to do with IPS. Neither does brightness. The main advantage of IPS is better color reproduction and wider viewing angle. Period.

    “Pixels are more closely packed together” I don’t even… Implying that an IPS display has a higher pixel density at the same resolution than an Amoled panel. How does that work lol?

    The reviewer clearly has no idea what he’s talking about and I wonder if someone like him should even be reviewing tech products in the first place.

  • 2 of my friends are using it. All are good except build quality. Very cheap. Even Qmobile has better build quality as compared to this crap. U start hating it right after you hold this mobile in hand. Hote note & Hot Note pro have better build.

  • The model has low capacity battery (2200mAh). Same model is now annouced with 3200mAh battery…

  • And what about 3G speed ?
    It can provides only up to 21 Mbps :P
    Ye review to na hua ek ad he ho gya :v
    :) ;)


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