Hands on review of the Infinix Hot S3

Design and screen

When I opened the box and saw the phone, the Infinix Hot S3 did not look like a K2000 phone. Even though it has a plastic exterior it looks real premium and could compete with some high-end smartphones in looks. The edges of the phone are curved with its infinity display giving users more space to view what’s on the screen. I have a sandstone black model and the back is a matte-ish material but it picks up fingerprints easily, luckily a silicone case comes with the phone so you don’t have to keep wiping it down.

The phone has a 5.65-inch display, 18:9 aspect ratio and comes with on-screen navigation buttons rather than off of it as we saw in phones like the Hot 4.

Just above the screen is the speaker grill, front camera and front facing LED flash.

At the very top is a 3.5 mm jack for audio output and headsets.

At the very bottom edge is a microphone, charging port and more speakers.

The power and volume buttons are on the right while the SIM tray is on the left of the device. The power button feels and looks like rugged metallic in texture than the volume rockers so you can differentiate between the two if you look away while operating them.

At the back of the phone are the camera and fingerprint scanner.

Specifications and software

The Infinix Hot S3 has good software, powered by the Snapdragon 430 SoC, an octa-core processor clocked at 1.4GHz. There are two variants of this smartphone, one with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, but had about 21GB of free space available when I first used the device. You can expand your storage with a microSD card of up to 128GB.

The phone supports WiFi and  2 nano-SIM cards on 4G/LTE. The Hot S3 runs on Android Oreo – out the box which is cool because that’s a recent Android operating system – with Infinix’s custom Hummingbird XOS 3.0 UI. It won’t feel like a strange OS and is easy to use, with its neat visuals.

The Hot S3 allows one-handed mode which shrinks the display on the screen so that you can use the device with one hand.

 Battery Life

Infinix Hot S3’s 4000mAh non-removable battery comes with a 10W charger in the box. It lasted me a whole day of phone usage, with my mobile data turned on and considering myself a heavy phone user. I get to bed around 23:00hrs with my battery at just about 20%.

Camera

The Infinix Hot S3 has a 13MP rear camera and a 20MP fixed-focus selfie camera. You’ll find 4 modes in-camera: Panorama, Night, Time Lapse and Professional.  You also get to choose HDR and flash on options to improve the quality of your photos depending on your environment.

Here are some pictures taken with it during the day:

Conclusion

For a budget smartphone this phone has had many admirers. It’s sleek-looking, fees great in the hand, the screen is a fair size for viewing multi-media and the display colours are quiet vivid. Performance-wise, I managed to work though multiple apps with ease and with none shutting down or hanging.

Star Rating.

I’ll give the Infinix Hot S3 a 4/5 rating because it’s brilliant and has a pretty good camera for its price compared to some other phones in that price range.