Infinix Note 11 Review: Decent budget phone, but software remains an issue

Infinix has established itself as a budget-oriented smartphone maker in India and has now come out with its latest Infinix Note 11 series of smartphones, which comes with various improvements such as XOS 10, an AMOLED display, a fresh new design, among other things. . The Infinix Note 11, priced at Rs 11,999 in India, comes as the successor to the Infinix Note 10 and I have been using the smartphone for the past few weeks to tell readers what I think of the smartphone and how far the brand has come in terms of its performance. overall experience that Infinix smartphones provide. Let’s see:

DESIGN

As I’ve said in my previous reviews, the design on Infinix smartphones is always the best, and the Infinix Note 11 is no different. The smartphone comes with a flat-edged design and features a matte gradient finish on the rear panel – a nice change from the usual glossy fingerprint magnet rear panels. I’m also a fan of flat edge designs as these are less likely to be touched accidentally and give a more confident grip on the device. On the back panel, the smartphone has a rectangular rear camera module with three lenses – a large one on top and two small lenses placed horizontally below the large lens.

On the front there is a waterdrop style notch and a slight chin – a secure design that will appeal to most users. It’s also super lightweight, so that’s great. A design flaw, at least on the device we received, is that the power button has to be pressed a little hard to unlock the smartphone, if you have not activated the fingerprint unlock.

SCREEN

The display is one of the biggest changes as marketed by the company. In reality, however, the difference between this AMOLED panel and the previous LCD screen is not great. Yes, the color and detail are more accurate and sharp because of the AMOLED panel, but that’s not something you’d notice as much as a high refresh rate display, which doesn’t exist on the Infinix Note 11. Not to be confused, this isn’t one. bad rendering. It’s good for watching all kinds of content and gaming, and the animations are smooth and correct. The AMOLED panel solves previous problems I’ve had with Infinix displays, such as pixelation where it shouldn’t be and less vibrant colors. Overall this is a good screen.

PERFORMANCE AND BATTERY

In terms of performance, the Infinix Note 11 comes with a MediaTek Helio G88 processor, paired with 4GB of RAM. The processor on the smartphone is good enough for your daily use and gaming sessions, and shows no signs of slowing down. It’s when someone does something that requires a little more, like editing an Instagram reel, that the Infinix Note 11 struggles. But again, we’ve seen flagship smartphones with Snapdragon 888 SoC and 12GB of RAM struggle with Reel editing, so this isn’t an issue. The smartphone never got hot during my use and there were no screen freezes or ghost touches during my short time with the Infinix Note 11.

It is the software that the smartphone really struggles with. The notification shade and quick settings menu are different: dragging down the notification bar from the left brings up notifications, while dragging down from the right opens quick settings. Because of this, I almost always had to hesitate before opening the notifications or the quick settings. The software is full of bloatware apps and in the early days every swipe to the deck (swipe right from the home screen) or even the notification shade will ask for permissions, making the process unnecessarily cumbersome. Furthermore, gestures are not precise. Deferring a side swipe to go back opens the dock with suggested apps and the screenshot controls and the like. Furthermore, notifications can only be removed by swiping to the right, swiping to the left opens the specific notification settings which can help you disable notifications and also delete them. The latter is not so confusing here if you get used to the interface of the smartphone.

However, there are useful features like X Hide that allows users to hide their banking and finance apps along with X Clone that duplicates apps. Very useful if you have two phone numbers and use WhatsApp on both numbers, so you don’t have to carry a secondary smartphone with you.

Battery on the smartphone is impressive. There’s a 5,000mAh unit that never ran out of power in less than two days during my use, with an average screen time of over 8 hours, which is impressive. Now these time windows include heavy tasks like gaming or recording videos or creating Reels on Instagram here and there. The 33W charging is also quite fast, charging the smartphone from zero to 100 in about an hour.

CAMERA

The camera on the Infinix Note 11 is just average, as you would expect from a budget smartphone. Outside in sunlight, the Infinix Note 11 takes sharp and clear photos that actually look pretty good. If you zoom in on these photos, the image will still be pixelated. In a closed environment, the camera clearly struggles to take quality photos, especially in challenging photos with lots of colors and focus areas. As I’ve noticed with other Infinix smartphones, Portrait mode does a good job of distinguishing the subject and blurring the background quite a bit, but so does the imprecise color and pixelation when zooming in.

In low light and night mode weather I wouldn’t call it better than average, but this is good enough for your basic social media posts. In terms of videos, the Infinix Note 11’s camera performs better and the videos are sharp and color accurate even when viewed on a larger screen.

The front camera does not fulfill its purpose and there are times when the image it puts out is slightly blurry. The front camera also offers a rather blurry image during video calls.

In keeping with the overall smartphone experience, the camera app on Infinix smartphones sees no changes and the interface is quite confusing. This is because the normal camera mode, commonly referred to as “Photo” mode on other smartphones, shows “AI camera” and the controls are everywhere.

JUDGMENT

The Infinix Note 11 is a good smartphone. It’s well designed, it performs well and has an average camera that is good enough for everyday use and social media messaging. The smartphone is a good budget option for mobile gamers as it has an AMOLED screen with enough battery to easily last a few gaming sessions. However, with XOS 10 not much has improved in terms of the overall user experience. While the company has addressed some of the issues in the past, it’s still one of the most complicated and bloatware-heavy Android skins out there, despite quirky features and improved privacy. I felt a lot of the same frustration that I had complained about with the previous XOS 7.6 and that’s not good. While the smartphone is certainly an upgrade over its predecessor, not much has changed in terms of the overall user experience.