Why you must avoid Infinix Phones like a plague

I am an ardent user of Infinix Phones, having praised the phones severally in articles like this one here. In 2015 I started using Infinix phones after receiving my first Infinix device from Infinix Mobility itself. It was an Infinix Hot 2, the first Android One smartphone in Africa. I lost the phone a few months after receiving it, forcing me to buy another Infinix Phone and this time it was the Infinix Note.

It was during my use of Infinix Note smartphone that I realized that Infinix phones have inherent problems – the battery charging problem. This I know because after writing the article on how to solve the Infinix Flash Charging Problems in June 2016 based on the experience I had with my Infinix Note, the article has remained in the top ten popular articles at Kachwanya.com, and it has been so every single day for almost two years now.

The Infinix charging problem forced me to change the charging chipset more than once in the Infinix Note, but the phone was pickpocketed from me during a Jubilee stop over rally at Nakuru just when I wanted to board a PSV to Kisii town. I ended up cancelling the trip but the following day I decided to buy another Infinix phone, the Infinix Note 2.

Infinix Note 2 did not give me a lot of problems other than its weak screen, continued hanging, freezing, and general unresponsiveness when using heavy duty apps like Facebook. My now late brother Odi Dypsy (some of you may know him) took the phone from me in September 2016 when I got a Huawei P9 Lite, but he didn’t use it for so long as by April 2017 he reported to me that the phone wouldn’t wake up. After his death which happened early last month, I found the phone in his belongings, took it to a fundi, and it got diagnosed with a dead-motherboard sickness. I told the fundi to keep the damn “mkebe”.

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The drama with Infinix Note 2 happened after I had bought yet another Infinix smartphone, the Infinix Note 3 Pro. I opted for the Pro version of Infinix Note 3 due to its 4G capabilities. Although Infinix Note 2 didn’t give me the Infinix charging problems, Infinix Note 3 Pro proved to be worse than Infinix Note on this menace. Just days after buying the phone, I had to change the battery charging chipset as the phone couldn’t fast charge. After changing the chipset, the phone couldn’t receive clear network signals, which forced me to again change the phone’s battery charging chipset, and the chipset I got after the second change couldn’t fast charge, forcing me to revert to the chipset that had poor network reception. My wife is currently using the phone but she knows she can’t make or receive calls indoors due to the phone’s poor network reception. A few months after buying the Infinix Note 3 Pro, Faiba 4G happened, an irresistible offer that would make anyone with common sense to drop Safaricom, Airtel and/or Telkom Internet for the Faiba 4G. I had to move to Faiba 4G ASAP.

But there was one problem, the Infinix Note 3 Pro does not support the 700Mhz spectrum that was freed from the analogue TV broadcasts to be used for Internet. As Kennedy Kachwanya explained here, the spectrum was awarded to JTL for testing (something that might have sent Wangusi home) allowing it to provide crazy data offers where I for example can comfortably buy 25GB data at Kshs 1,000 ONLY. Given that my Infinix Note 3 Pro did not support this spectrum of 4G, I was supposed to once again upgrade to a better phone. Being a lover of Infinix, I bought their very high end device, the Infinix Zero 5.

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Infinix Zero 5 promised to be a great device. Foremost, it is affordable for an high end device, going for Kshs 26K only compared to over Kshs 80K that the likes of iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy Note 8 are going for. Secondly, it packs all the high end capabilities of modern day high end smartphones including properly functioning biometrics, dual camera that should work well in low light, portrait modes in both rear and front camera, and generally a well designed non-plastic phone.

But Infinix Zero 5 wouldn’t last a day before giving me headaches. First, it is a real struggle using the phone’s native phone dialer/phone log App as the app does not allow you to easily search for contacts, sticks to last dialed number even after you have quit the screen (this wastes time when you want to make something close to an emergency call), and is generally user unfriendly. Secondly, the phone has the ability to cause unknown issues that have forced me to restore it to factory settings no less than three times since I bought it around Christmas last year. That implies that I have factory restored the phone once every month since I bought it. Lastly, the phone has the tendency of changing my screen and menu settings every time it updates its Theme, the so called XTheme, very annoying.

Having said all those, here is the summary why you must avoid Infinix Phones like a plague

  1. Infinix phones are designed for cheapness. If it is not the battery chipset that will give you headaches, then it is the motherboard, or just another chipset.
  2. The network receivers in infinix phones are generally weak, and mostly the Infinix phones will lack one or two crucial bandwidths like the one being used by Faiba 4G.
  3. The user interface is generally user unfriendly as explained in the phone dialer/phone log app above.
  4. Although their flagship Infinix Zero 5 has 6GB RAM and an octa core 2.5GHz processor, if you load way so many apps and forget to clear them every so often, the phone still slows down to at times freeze point.
Odipo Riaga
Managing Editor at KachTech Media
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