Friends+Design
- Just like its elder sibling, the Infinix S5, the Lite model has a trendy punch-hole camera design (cheapest phone with punch-hole camera), with an excellent 90.5% screen-to-body ratio
- Looks good with a plastic body - the glossy back panel has a glittery finish, unlike the ‘Crystal Feather’ pattern on the Infinix S5
- Reasonably light-weight
- Both the rear fingerprint sensor, and the face unlock, work well
- One-handed usage is not very easy - reaching the top edge of the display is quite hard
Display
- Large 6.6-inch, 20:9 aspect ratio, immersive display - ideally suited to watch videos
- The display quality is also quite decent for this price bracket - you get good brightness, good sunlight legibility, and vibrant colors
- Lacks an ambient light sensor - so you will need to adjust brightness manually
Software
- While Infinix's custom XOS UI is relatively easy to get around, it does pack a ton of bloatware - some of it can be uninstalled - but there's Palm Store and AHA Games, neither of which can be uninstalled - and they send spammy notifications, that can't be disabled
Performance
- Good performance with the MediaTek Helio P22 SoC under the hood (similar to Snapdragon 625) - day-to-day performance is smooth, and so is casual gaming - but heavier titles struggled to run at their ideal graphics settings
Camera
- Decent, triple camera setup at the rear: 16-megapixel primary sensor, a 2-megapixel depth sensor, and a low light sensor
- Primary camera clicks decent pictures in daylight conditions - it delivers almost natural-looking results and the HDR mode makes the shots even better
- The 16-megapixel front camera produces usable selfies as long as you avoid using the Beauty mode
- Portraits shots aren't that great - subject detection and background blur could have been better (competing phones like the Redmi 8 are much better)
- Low light performance is average
Battery
- Good battery life with a 4000mAh battery - will give you about 1.5 days of usage on moderate use
- The supplied 6W charger is on the slower side (compared to the 10W with Infinix S5 and other competitors) - takes over 4 hours to charge the phone completely
Verdict
- The Infinix S5 Lite is a decent smartphone, but doesn't stand high among the competitors - for the same price, Redmi 8 offers better camera, larger battery and fast charging - and if you can spend a little more, then Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 8 and the Realme 5 are solid options
