Infinix Hot 10 Unboxing and Review By Eric Okafor

Hey guys, it’s Eric here and this is my unboxing and review of the Infinix Hot 10. Yes, the Hot 9 already has a successor barely 5 months later and we’re about to find out if it’s worth buying. First off let’s see what we have in the box. 
When you open it up, you’re greeted with the smartphone. Let’s take out the sticker on the front and on the back. This is the Amber color, it also comes in Black, Moonlight Jade and Ocean Wave.

We have a warranty card, an envelope that houses the SIM ejection tool, a film screen protector, your X-club leaflet, and a transparent TPU case. Let see how well this fits, you have all your necessary cut outs and it protects the camera properly. 
On the bottom compartment, We have a standard 10 watt charger, a micro USB cable and a pair of earphones. For supported bands, you can find it right in the settings, system, manual guide, we see the supported 4G LTE bands including Glo 4G band 28 On the front you have a 6.78 inch HD Plus IPS LCD display with 20.5 by 9 aspect ratio. On the top left corner, you have a punch hole that houses an 8 megapixel selfie camera with dual flash.


On the back, you have a 16 megapixel quad camera setup with quad flash. You also have a finger print sensor and some Infinix branding. 

On the left you have a 3 in 1 tray that house is 2 4g/Lte nano SIMs and an SD card On the right you have a volume rocker and power button 
On the top you have nothing

On the bottom you have a a 3.5mm headphone jack, a
microphone, a micro USB port and a speaker 
About the design, Infinix Hot 10 spots the classic 2020 camera layout but without the chrome finish so maybe not the most premium looking. The back and frame are made from plastic and this gradient color has a zig zag pattern that is not so easy to see on camera. By the way this color isn’t shouting like the hot Pink S5 Pro I reviewed, it’s quite subtle.



This is a pretty big phone and its weight is leaning towards the heavy side. Also not ideal for one handed use. I feel like that goes without saying now. On the front, the bezels are looking a little thick and spots a bit of a chin. There’s no option to hide the punch hole here coz why will anyone do that.

Anyway, the display is very bright outdoors but the viewing angles are average. Colors aren’t too bad and the aspect ratio is ideal for consuming media but it is only a HD+ display and YouTube videos are capped at 720P. 
 Compared to the Hot 9 play, they are design differences like the speaker placement on the bottom and the Punch hole in place of a notch. Compared to the Infinix Note 7, they only look identical on the front but Note 7 has thinner bezels. 
 Hot 10 comes with 64 Gigs of storage and 3 gigs of ram.

You get 53 Gigs of available storage. 
We’re running on Android 10 with XOS Dolphin version 7.0 slapped on top of it. When you swipe down, you have a very busy quick settings and yeah let’s not forget all the bloatware and ads with XOS, some of which cannot be deleted. I can live with it but I think it’s high time Infinix gave us the second space feature for privacy sake, especially coz FSARS, a unit of the Nigerian Police force are randomly maiming young people who refuse to give them access to their phones. We’ve been harassed for years and we’re currently protesting so please help lend a voice using the hashtag #EndSARS on social media.

Meanwhile, I’ve covered most of what you need to know about XOS Dolphin in my Note 7 review, I’d be leaving a link up above. 
The Hot 10 uses the Mediatek Helio G70 Octa-Core CPU clocked at 2.0GHZ and it’s the same gaming midrange CPU on the Note 7. In terms of performance, I’d say it generally feels just as fast as the Note 7. Running everyday apps like social media and messaging like a champ. I compared Helio G70 with the Helio P35 CPU earlier so if you haven’t seen that yet, I’d be linking it up above.

However I could do a speed and RAM management test between the Note 7 and Hot 10 just to see how many apps 3GB of RAM can keep open compared to 6GB of RAM. Let me know in the comments if that’s something you’d like to see. 
The fingerprint sensor is quite good in terms of unlocking speed and accuracy. As for the less secure face unlock, it works great outdoors, fast and everything but it didn’t unlock with indoor lighting which is my usual scene, so maybe don’t bother setting it up. Here’s how the speaker compares side by side the Hot 9 Play’s

When it comes to gaming, as usual I played PUBG on HD graphics and high frame rates, the highest PUBG setting for this phone.

Yeah I’m probably playing with a bunch of bots but the gaming performance is pretty smooth just like the Note 7 which I did a separate gaming review for. Unlike the Note 7 however, I won’t recommend leaving your game to quickly perform a couple of tasks hoping to get back to it. Good thing you have mini WhatsApp and Chrome widget that you can access by swiping right from the edge of the screen. The Infinix Hot 10 is powered by a 5200mAh battery and I put it through my usual battery test including an Insane 7 hours of PUBG, and instagram all on WiFi. This gave me almost 16 hours of screen on time with 5 percent left to spare.

It’s the kind of Battery life that gives you confidence throughout the day. I will file this under the battery beast plus category. 

It took me 3 hours and 15 minutes to charge from 0 to 100 percent which cannot be helped even when you use a fast charger because it does not support fast charging. 
The Hot 10’s camera interface is pretty simple and you won’t get some of the features you get on the Note 7, now let’s see some photos. Using it outdoors, we get okay dynamic range.

However, when cropped in, the details are lacking. With a human subject, it actually doesn’t look bad at all for a phone in this price range. It’s not the most detailed shot but it’s well saturated and the skin tones are on point. 
With portrait mode, it’s looking warmer but the sense of depth is actually better than most. What it lacks in details, it makes up for with the very small margin for error.


The Selfie camera outdoors is actually very prone to over exposure and again, lacking in details when cropped in but will still look good on social media. Using portrait mode, the depth sensing is fair. It does look like it has some beauty filter applied. 
By the way over exposure is something that plagues the primary camera too. 

I tried Macro mode, it does put close subjects in focus.

Not that I will ever use this asides testing. 

Let’s compare it with the Hot 9 Play,

With the selfie camera, we can see that the Hot 10 has a better skin tone and the Hot 9 Play’s camera is even more prone to overexposure but it does have more details when you crop in. 

With the primary camera outdoors, the difference isn’t a lot, they both blew out some of the electrified wires completely. 

They look more or less the same here as well. 

Indoors, we see the selfie shot on the Hot 10 pull far ahead of the washed out photo shot on the Hot 9 Play They may be both spot 8 megapixel cameras but they definitely differ in image processing.

Same can be said for the Primary camera, the Hot 10 is looking like the average low end camera while the Hot 9 Play screams entry level. The type of picture quality that won’t look cool even on social media. 

Using portrait mode, the lighting is better here and we see some oversharpening on the Hot 9 Play’s shot which might have worked in its favour depending on whom you ask. The dual front firing flash of the Hot 10 gives it a more realistic color but quality wise, they’re both meh. 

with super night mode, it’s not so super on both of these.

The fact that one is brighter than the other doesn’t mean any one is useable. It records videos in 2K for the front and back camera. The Infinix Hot 10 seems to be closing the gap between the Hot and Note series. It may share the same processor as the Note 7 and even have ample 64gig storage space. However, the camera quality is definitely leaning more towards the low end spectrum.

It also has all of the cons of the Note 7 like the Micro USB port and 720P display. It also takes forever to charge, doesn’t spot dual stereo speakers and 3GB RAM means only limited apps can run simultaneously. All of which are to be expected from the Hot series anyway. 
It’s more or less an affordable Hot Note hybrid made for people who only seriously care about gaming and long lasting battery life. It’s priced at N60,200 which converts to $135 US dollars and you can pick yours up on Jumia Nigeria using my affiliate link in the description.



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Source : Eric Okafor