The $200 Smartphone, Infinix 8 Review

infinix is coming out with a phone called the infinix note 8 for 200 flat in 2020 so this full-blown smartphone like this for 200 even like I remember when 200 bucks and below was reserved for either dumb phones or flip phones or just extremely old phones that they're like trying desperately to sell but we'll probably never see another software update again and even today 200 bucks are wireless headphones you know some Bluetooth, speakers basically but now there's clearly a full-fledged 200 smartphones like this in 2020. 

so my question is how good are they really how good is this new baseline because obviously, you're not expecting you know high-end flagship internals or specs or bells and whistles or anything but like how good is this new baseline because we've come a long way so first of all let's just start with what comes in the box also by the way yes I do have a bunch of these extra ones over here stay tuned till the end I'll detail a little giveaway I'm doing with some of these on Twitter so make sure you're following over there but the box here as you can see is pretty simple giving you the name and some specs and then when you get inside the phone is up at the top and it is a big phone but we'll get to that in a second then also included in this sleeve underneath  is the sim card ejector tool a screen protector and then an included clear plastic case which again you know in a world where most people do put a case on their phone it is a pretty nice thing to see. 

you get that for free at this baseline then underneath that is probably the best part actually because you can't make this stuff for granted you also get an 18-watt fast charging brick a USB C cable and a pair of wired earbuds so to get them and the fast charger in a world where some don't even have a charger is pretty good. 

okay so then the phone itself I feel like what helps you actually appreciate what you're getting or how much you're getting here is just how much attention they put into having it resemble the higher end phones like I guess at the highest level they're all kind of trying to look like the same highest end phones we've seen that with the notch and with adding extra cameras and stuff like that and at that high level, it is kind of nitpicky competition stuff but at this level it's actually really appreciated like look at this screen a 200 the phone used to have a small screen big bezels I mean they obviously used to not look that great this phone has a gigantic display it's a 6.95 inch LCD display so there's tons of room here now it is 1640 by 720 resolution. 

so clearly not the sharpest thing in the world but just as far as typical use you know scrolling through social media looking at photos watching videos especially that's what it's good at this is fine and there's also a stereo speaker pair one with the top earpiece and one at the bottom so you're not going to easily block the whole thing with just one finger and it gets decently loud so the media experience on this phone already is actually I'd say pretty impressive for 200 bucks I'm not going to nitpick about viewing angles and refresh rate obviously for this price but it's worth noting infinix actually makes another phone here called the zero eight which for 250 bucks has a 1080p 90hz display. 

back of the phone the back of the note 8 here is this like interesting pattern of glossy blue pyramid shapes it's pretty neat I guess plastic material of course but hey you can drop that case on it that you got for free with the phone if you want to and then at the bottom here you may notice it is USB type-c which again you actually shouldn't take for granted there's like a whole world of gadgets that are still catching up on that front and also a headphone jack which actually still feels more necessary in this world of budget phones where not everybody is also trying to shell out 100 more dollars on wireless headphones.  

do I know my favorite thing though that they mimicked from high-end phones is the gigantic battery a lot of phones coming out now have huge batteries this one has a 5 200 milliamp-hour battery that's pretty sweet they've branded it they call it power marathon tech I just call it a huge battery honestly and we know when you combine a huge battery with a 720p display and a chip that doesn't take a ton of power there's an helio g80 processor in this phone, you're looking at a two day phone for a lot of people who get this phone and they're still fast charging if you need it then the software experience takes inspiration from a couple different places. 

I can tell though it is obviously still skinned there's no getting around that with what they're calling you on top of android 10 and there are some ads in the os as we've seen in some other affordable phones and there are some pre-loaded apps as well but hey that's the beauty of android is if you want to drop another launcher on here or uninstall basically any of these apps you can easily do so and performance is good enough through animations and scrolling as you can see this is what 60hz is going to feel like and you're also getting 128 gigs of storage and 6 gigs of ram so enough to run some games on that huge nearly 7-inch display and feel totally fine with it.  

there's a couple interesting features built into the software too like I found there's this multitasking pop-up that comes up when you swipe in from the side and hold and that will give you some shortcuts to quickly get into your top five favorite apps you can customize or start a screen recording or take a screenshot quickly so that's actually something pretty unique I don't think I've seen on any other phones at all now for cameras this might be the area where it it's most trying to look like the most expensive phones, I think it does that's why you've got this bar back here total of six cameras on this phone four on the back two on the front so the four back cameras are the 64 megapixels the main camera then macro camera a dev sensor and what they call the AI lens so yeah mostly what you're going to be working with here is the main camera and maybe occasionally the macro and the photos you get out of this 200 phone.

I'd say are passable now of course as soon as you get into difficult lighting you know where you wouldn't even think of bringing some phones from the past this is where this one will start to suffer mainly in dynamic range and noise but again I don't think anybody buying this the phone will mind that one bit and the fact that this camera is so nice and snappy actually pretty responsive in the first place is a nice bonus and then the selfie camera up here at the front in your dual infinity o cutout is joined by a depth sensor as well for improved portrait mode again just makes it look more like the high-end phones of this past year but you know the photos are passable for 200 bucks and even a little portrait mode action will work if you're into that so overall I'm actually I would say impressed. 

i think I've gotten in such a good rhythm of looking at all these different high-end bleeding edge phones and we also know what to expect in that sort of hardware but on another level I think it's harder to make a good phone at this price like a lot of good decisions have to go into making a good phone for 200 bucks and it's happening in 2020.