Hong-Kong based company Infinix has been a long-time player in India with a bunch of budget phones, including in its ‘Hot’ series. They’ve recently launched two Hot phones, Hot 11 and Hot 11s and we’re looking at the latter as it’s being referred to by many to be the best budget phone of recent times.

The Hot 11s comes out of a bright green but otherwise regular box, with all the essentials in place. You do get a charging brick in the box and also a soft TPU case though it really isn’t absolutely necessary to use one with this phone. The device has a plastic back with an unusual wavy pattern built into it. The back is glossy but manages not to display smudges outright. On the back, apart from the camera assembly, you’ll find a modest Infinix logo and also, notably, the round fingerprint sensor. It’s placed a little high up and rather close to the cameras, looking somehow asymmetrical, but well, at least it’s there.

Looking around the edges you may be pleased to see there’s a 3.5mm jack, if you still find it relevant. You’ll also find the SIM tray has place for two SIMS and a memory card in addition. You’ll spot a single speaker and mic and the sound is a little thin and reedy and perhaps not loud enough. The devices has a 5,000mAh and is much lighter (200gms) than you would expect it to be. It’s a large phone so it really could have been heavier, but thankfully it isn’t. The charging brick is an 18W but this big battery takes over two hours for the whole thing to charge from zero to full.

The screen is actually surprisingly good for a phone of this price. It’s a 1080p LCD 6.78 inch Full HD+ display which is quite bright and has pretty good viewing angles as well. The colours are punchy and definitely make this screen great at this price. But we have more. This phone can be configured for the screen to refresh at 90Hz and 180Hz touch sampling. So yes, it feels fast to use quite unlike a budget phone. However you don’t get Widevine L1 support.

The Hot 11s works with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage — so it’s a good thing there’s that memory card slot for 256GB expansion. The processor is a MediaTek Helio G88 octa-core. Android 11 with Infinix’s X0S is the software used here and it’s fine except for being too busy, overdone and full of unwanted apps. There are also lots of notifications that will leave you wondering where the source is and having to work at taming them. You can’t even uninstall several of the unsolicited apps. But overall everything works quite smoothly with no heating for everyday tasks.

The camera module is arranged in quite a premium fashion on the back. The main camera is a 50MP and it’s not bad with pretty good image processing, good colours and dynamic range and even not bad low light images. The other accompanying cameras are just that - accompaniments. The front camera is a an 8MP and quite acceptable. There’s no ultra-wide for the front camera though. Video recording is at 2K at 30fps.

For ₹10,999 the Hot 11s is quite a good deal, competing with Xiaomi’s Redmi 10 Prime and beating it on a few points including the screen.

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