Infinix Zero 30 5G Review

Infinix has been on a roll in the past few months and that is evident from the recent #1 spot of parent company 54, Transsion, for most smartphone shipments in Q2 of 2023. The Infinix Note 30 VIP 117 was a hit, and so was the Infinix GT10 Pro 131.

Now, we have the Infinix ZERO 30 5G that checks almost everything you’d want for an affordable mid-ranger smartphone.

Design and Construction

Our unit is in the Golden Hour colorway, and we must say that it’s a very bright and refreshing tone where the back panel changes color as it hits the light at certain angles – it does look like the vibrant colors of the sky at 3 to 5PM where photographers refer to as the golden hour.

The device is pretty solid — it has an all-metal chassis with a glass-on-glass body at the front and back. It is very thin at just 7.9mm and weighs just 185 grams.

Lots of attention to detail was put in here – volume rocker on the right side together with the power button; one of two speaker grills at the bottom along with the USB Type-C port, SIM card slot, and primary mic; secondary noise-canceling microphone up top along with the second stereo speaker and a fine laser-etching label of “Powered by Infinix” along the side.

There’s an under-display fingerprint sensor embedded with the 3D curved display up front. The punch-hole camera is placed at the top middle corner that features a massive 50MP vlogging camera, boasting of 4K at 60fps video recording capability.

On the rear side, the frosted glass back panel is smooth but not slippery to the hand. It’s also smudge and fingerprint-resistant, which we really appreciate.

Beneath the glass protection, there’s a textured coating that variably reflects light and emits different colors depending on the angle of reflection. It’s a pretty subtle but nice touch, similar to what we’ve seen in the vivo V27 13 and V29 27 series.

Display, Biometrics and Multimedia

With a 6.78-inch display, the Infinix ZERO 30 has all the goods you’d look for — a curved glass display protected by Gorilla Glass 5, bright AMOLED with a high refresh rate (144Hz to be precise), and an above-average screen resolution of 1080×2400 pixels.

The dynamic refresh rate can be set to automatic or manually set to either 60Hz, 120Hz and 144Hz. We prefer setting it to automatic most of the time, and it adjusts fine depending on what’s on display.

For biometrics, you have an in-display fingerprint sensor as the primary locking mechanism but you can also opt for facial recognition to unlock the device on top of the usual pin, pattern or password options.

The ZERO 30 comes with two speaker grills — a down-firing primary speaker and a secondary one at the top. The placement of the stereo speakers is a welcome addition but not very optimal for movie playback or gaming. Nevertheless, sound quality is good and volume is loud enough (well, as long as you don’t cover them with your palm when holding it in landscape orientation).

Camera

The Infinix ZERO 30 5G is equipped with a triple-camera system with a very bright quad-LED ring flash.

The main camera of the ZERO 30 uses a Samsung ISOCELL HM6 which is a 108MP sensor first introduced in March 2022 and originally used in the realme 9 4G 47.

There’s a large camera module flaking the upper left side with 3 cameras and an LED ring flash. The camera system is headlined by a 108MP sensor with f/1.75 aperture, phase-detection autofocus and optical image stabilization.

And then, we have that 50MP front camera that can shoot 4k at 60fps. Not a lot of smartphones can shoot at this level, so props to Infinix for pushing this feature.

Check out these sample videos taken using the front camera:

So a maximum of 4K @ 60fps, 1080p @ 60fps and slow-motion capture of up to 240fps at 720p.

OS, UI and Apps

The ZERO 30 5G runs on XOS 13.1 which is based on Android 13. The UI is pretty simple, clean and primarily base don gesture controls but you can switch it back to the old 3-button menu controls.

There are also a few pre-installed native apps like XClub, Smart Scanner, My Health, Carlcare, Visha Player, WOW FM and Hi Browser. Third-party apps like WPS Office and Tiktok are also pre-installed.

There’s an AHA Games and Palm Store offers recommended games and apps to download outside of the Google Play Store. The Infinix XArena is the native version of Game Assistant Panel to optimize the device for gaming while Folax is the default Voice Assistant to replace Google Assistant.

Performance and Benchmarks

Powering the Zero 30 5G is a Mediatek Dimensity 8020 chipset. This is composed of a quad-core high-performance ARM Cortex A78 running at 2.6GHz clock speed and another set of quad-core power-efficient ARM Cortex A55 running at 2.0GHz. Not very many devices have been using this chipset (the Motorola Edge 40 is the other one)

To complete the combo, it comes with a 9-core ARM Mali-G77 MC9 GPU, 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM and another 9GB of optional Extended RAM.

All considered, the combination of this hardware provides great performance to the Zero 30, especially in gaming. To keep up with the demands of 4K videos, the internal storage here starts at 256GB UFS 3.1, although we’re quite puzzled with the lack of a microSD card expansion slot to come along with the dual nano SIM trays.

We’ve also done our initial benchmarks and got these test results:

Antutu Benchmark v10: 695,526
Antutu Storage Test:
Read: 1,884 MB/s
Write: 1,606 MB/s
Random Read: 281 MB/s
Random Write: 324 MB/s
3D Mark – 4,315
Geekbench 6: 990 (Single), 3255 (Multi)
Geekbench 6 GPU: 1,219 (Vulkan), 4190 (OpenCL)
PC Work 3.0 Performance: 13,952

The scores alone tell us this is a pretty capable device and should be a great mid-range gaming smartphone. We also tested a few games for a short while, like Asphalt 9 and Mobile Legends, and Genshin Impact with excellent results. We’ve set them to High Quality display and still got good frame rates north of 60fps.

Connectivity and Battery Life

As for connectivity, all you will ever need here are present – dual 5G support, WiFi 6, Bluetooth, GPS, and NFC.

In our PCMark battery test, the ZERO 30 5G scored 11 hours and 45 minutes which is quite decent. In our video loop test, the device only lasted 17 hours and 40 minutes playing a full HD video. In both tests, the phone was set at 50% brightness, zero volume and in airplane mode. The average battery life seems to point to the high refresh rates (144Hz) that the display switches to during video playback, essentially wasting battery life.

The phone comes with the 68W Super Charge right out of the box and is able to fully charge the device from zero to 100% in just under an hour, which isn’t that impressive either.

Conclusion

We got tons of expectations with the Infinix ZERO 30 5G and, for the most part, it has delivered on its promise. Infinix managed to cram everything one would look for in a budget mid-ranger, and then some more.

The design, display, performance and camera all checks out that you’d think this model is positioned to dish it out against premium mid-range devices in the 20k to 25k price range, yet you’re only asked to fork out just Php14,999 for it. Now, if that’s not what “bang-for-your-buck” means, then we don’t know what else to call it.

It’s going to be hard to match this device in this price category. That one we are sure of.

The Infinix ZERO 30 5G is now out in stores and comes in Rome Green, Golden Hour and Fantasy Purple colorways. You can get it at a suggested retail price of only Php14,999 for the 12GB RAM and 256GB ROM variant. Grab the Infinix ZERO 30 5G over at Lazada 67, Shopee 66 and Tiktok 16.

INFINIX ZERO 30 5G (X6731) specs:
6.78-inch FHD+ 144Hz 3D Curved AMOLED Display @ 1080×2400 pixels
Corning Gorilla Glass 5
Mediatek Dimensity 8020
4x ARM Cortex A78 @ 2.6GHz + 4x ARM Cortex A55 @ 2.0GHz
ARM Mali-G77 MP9
12GB RAM (+9GB Extended RAM)
256GB internal storage (no microSD card expansion slot)
Dual nano SIM 5G
108MP f/1.75 PDAF OIS main camera
13MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera
2MP f/2.4 macro camera
50MP front camera, 4K @ 60fps
WiFi-6
Bluetooth 5.3
GPS with aGPS support
XOS 10 (based on Android 13)
5,000mAh Li-Ion battery with 68W Super Charge, PD 3.0, QC 4.0
164.5 x 75 x 7.9 mm (dimensions)
185 grams (weight)

What we liked about it:
* Beautiful design, solid metal build
* Good gaming performance
* Impressive display quality with high refresh rates
* Powerful selfie camera
* Generous RAM and storage option

What we did not like:
* No microSD card expansion slot
* Average battery life