Hello internet and welcome to Shu’s Techs, the Tech website where I, Shaibu, do the research and you get the results. So today’s review is taking us down the midrange lane and the phone in concern is the Infinix S4 (X626B).
For an overview, the Infinix S4 is a midrange device that comes with the latest Android 9 (Pie), it has a dewdrop 6.22-inch IPS screen with a resolution of 720 x 1520 pixels. Coming with four cameras, it has a 32 Megapixel Selfie shooter and a Triple camera setup at the back. 3GB or 6GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB of internal storage and a 2.0-GHz octa core CPU.
I’ve been using this device for a little over 4 days and I think, as a midranger, this is a pretty decent device. I’ve got the 6GB of RAM variant with 64GB ROM.
If you want to know a little more about this device, you can read on to check out the rest of what this phone offers. So, with that being said, let’s get to it.
Key Features
- Android 9.0 (Pie), XOS 5.0
- 6.22-inch 720 x 1520 IPS capacitive touchscreen
- Octa-core 2.00 GHz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU
- PowerVR Rogue GE8320 GPU
- 3GB / 6GB RAM
- 32GB / 64GB Internal Storage
- 32MP Front Camera
- 13MP + 2MP + 8MP Rear Cameras
- 4000mAh non-removable battery
- Dual Nano SIM
What’s in the Box?
Well, including the typical manuals that no one reads, you get everything you expect to get straight out of a box. The phone itself, a charger and a USB cord.
You’re also getting a pair of earphones, a Silicon case, the pin for ejecting your SIM cards or SD Card and a regular screen protector with a warranty for fixing a broken screen for free within the first 100 days of purchase.
I purchased a glass screen protector and slapped it on, on the first day. Safety first right?
Design
Compared to most midrange phones I’ve used in the past, this phone is pretty tall and slim. I mean it seems like that’s what’s going on these days. “Just make it slimmer and taller.”
My model comes in blue… and black, it is actually Nebula Blue. Yeah at first glance, you’ll say it’s blue, but when you look at the bottom of the phone, you’ll notice how there’s a kind of gradient color combination of the blue and black.
Being that black is one of my favorite colors, it was a bummer that I couldn’t get the Gray model, but I guess the blue and black model I got didn’t leave me black and blue.
You can get the phone in other colors such as Space Gray and Twilight Purple.
At first when I saw the phone, I thought the back was made out of glass. It was really reflective (and a huge fingerprint magnet, I must say, get ready to clean those prints if you don’t plan to use a case) but it really is just plastic.
Kinda what you get on the Samsung A40 and A50, apart from the rainbow-like color display. I have even managed to scratch the plastic back on the S4 when I was testing it out, don’t worry, it’s a minor scratch.
You will end up using the case that comes with this phone, or else you may be getting a broken screen fixed or even worse, spending more money on another phone. It is a really slippery phone.
You definitely can’t keep it on a very smooth surface without it sliding off to the ground. My table isn’t even that smooth but the phone still manages to move freely on it. But it wasn’t a problem. I hardly ever use phones without putting them in a case.
And no, don’t think about taking this phone near any form of water, this is not a water resistant phone. It is a midranger and these kind of phones aren’t close to getting this kind of feature yet.
Turning over to the front, you get a glass build. I’m not really sure what kind of glass is used on the Infinix S4 but it looks fantastic.
For placements, funny enough, there’s nothing at the top of the phone. On the left side, you get a SIM and a Micro SD Slot. On the right, you get the Volume buttons and the Power buttons. They are very clicky and feel good when pressed.
The bottom of the phone is where everything else is placed. From left to right, you get a speaker, a microUSB port and a 3.5mm Headphone Jack.
No you’re not getting a USB Type-C port on the Infinix S4. I wish we could have those on midrange devices.
Anyway, moving on. The selfie camera is placed in the Dewdrop Notch on the screen and behind you’ll find the Triple camera setup and a Fingerprint Scanner. Oh yeah, there’s also a Quad-LED flash here.
Now the camera bump at the back does protrude a little bit, but no worries, you can still use the phone on a flat surface without it wobbling.
Overall, I’ll say the Infinix S4 has really nice design. It feels good to hold and doesn’t feel heavy (without the case on). The edges don’t feel sharp as well.
For those of you who like gaming on their phone while it’s charging, well I won’t say you’ll encounter problems. But if you connect a pair of headphones to the bottom of the phone while it’s charging, gaming will be very uncomfortable. Design-wise, I think this is one of the problems the phone has.
Concerning the phone’s tallness, well, if you have really large hands, you won’t need to use two hands as you use the device. We’re used to that anyway. Phones these days just keep getting taller.
Display
I like the display on this device, it definitely isn’t the best you’ll get on a midrange device but it is really worth its price.
The Infinix S4 comes with a 6.2-inch IPS LCD screen with a Resolution of 720 x 1520 pixels. Its bezels aren’t the thinnest you’ll find, but they are not going to make you feel like you’re holding a phone from 8 years ago.
Only thickness you might get worried about is the chin.
You get a screen to body ratio of 82%, which is impressive on a phone like this.
Like I said earlier, I had to get a glass protector for the screen, so any pictures you’ll be seeing aren’t the actual pictures of the screen. But even with the screen protect on, I haven’t had any issues with how responsive the phone is.
The screen comes with a Dewdrop Notch and so far, I haven’t had issues with it intruding in my movie watching or gameplays. But you can hide the notch with a black bar, if you wish to.
The phone gets bright enough indoors on auto brightness. When you take it outdoors, well, I can’t say it’s the best but it is totally usable. You won’t have to look for some shade before you will be able to use the phone.
Sunlight eligibility is just average. It’s not the most visible display you’ll get on a phone under direct sunlight. But usability however, is possible.
Seems like Infinix had we, night phone users, in mind when they made this device. With Eye care (more like “I care”), a blue filter will be applied on the screen. This makes the phone easy to use at night and doesn’t necessarily keep you from sleeping when you eventually have to.
If things look too tiny on the screen, well, good news, you can adjust the Font size on this device. I usually leave it on default because I’m okay with it, but you can always increase or decrease the font size as you wish.
A Read Mode feature is also available here. This “intelligently adjust screen brightness and color temperature” for apps you specify to use it on. I used this feature just once, it works more like the “eye care” mode, but not as dim.
Turning on “eye care” mode automatically turns off the Read Mode. You will find yourself using just the “Eye Care” mode most of the time. I’m going to call this Read Mode redundant.
So overall, the Infinix S4 comes with a really good screen. You definitely aren’t getting a 4K display with this device when you stream videos on YouTube, but for its price, I don’t see anything wrong with it.
Cameras
Infinix still has a long way to go when it comes to their cameras, I don’t really think they are quite there yet. The Infinix S4 has four cameras. I’m going to start with the Selfie camera.
The good part about the selfie camera is that on paper, it has really good specs. It is a 32 Megapixel Selfie camera. It supports different shooting modes that will impress most picture enthusiasts out there.
First of all, you can take Portrait shots with this camera. Now don’t expect perfect results. This is because really good portrait shots really require two cameras, one for depth sensing and the other for the actual picture itself.
Since there’s no secondary selfie camera for depth sensing, the Bokeh effect is done through software. However, the results aren’t that bad.
The camera mode you’ll be taking most pictures in is the AI CAM. And although this is a 32 Megapixel shooter, by default, you shoot pictures in 19 Megapixels.
To use the full 32 Megapixels, you’ll have to switch the aspect ratio to 4:3H.
Phones with dewdrop notches don’t usually come with a front facing LED Flash and the Infinix S4 is no exception. To work around the phone not having a Flash, before your selfie gets taken, the phone displays a bright white screen.
This improves the brightness of your selfies but not by much. You can enable this by turning on the “Flash” when you use the selfie camera.
The “Beauty Mode” is another feature on the Selfie camera, this does a really fancy job of making your face look smooth. There are 6 levels here and each level increases the smoothness a little more. Leaving it on “AI” allows the phone to choose the best level based on the scene.
There’s also an AR mode (which means Augmented Reality), if you’ve used Snapchat or Facebook before, I’m sure you know what this means.
When it comes to videos, I don’t really think the Selfie camera is as great as it sounds, I shot a video with it and the results weren’t that impressive. Although when I was shooting the video, it looked okay on the screen, but when I watched it later, it looked odd.
My face had a really grainy texture and it looked like I had many tiny drops of water on it. It didn’t look natural at all.
Overall, regular pictures come out decent, with really punchy colors, maybe a little too punchy, though.
Turning over to the back, this is where you get really decent camera performance. You get a 13 Megapixel Main camera, a 2 Megapixel Depth Sensor and an 8 Megapixel Wide Angle camera.
Starting with the main camera, by default, it shoots pictures in 7 Megapixels. To use the whole 13 Megapixels, you still have to switch the aspect ratio to 4:3H.
Taking pictures in 7 Megapixels however is quite nice, details get lost the farther you are from the subject, though. But for normal everyday shots, the S4 will deliver.
The Main camera also has various modes, the AI CAM mode, a Beauty mode which both work like the Selfie camera’s and an AR mode.
The Portrait mode here is a bit better compared to the selfie camera’s. You get a slider to choose the intensity of the blur.
Just to make sure the depth sensor actually works, and not that we’re being fooled by an ineffective lens, I decided to cover the lens for depth sensing with my finger and well, I was proved wrong.
The camera app said “Lens Covered”, that about cleared out most of my doubts.
For shooting videos, you get up to 1080p videos at 30 frames. Sound gets captured well and I really can’t tell if the videos come out stabilized. From my use of it so far, all I can say it at least has Optical Image Stabilization and not Electronic Image Stabilization.
I may be wrong on that though; I don’t have any official statement that says it does.
You can shoot pictures in HDR but there’s no support for Panorama, but that’s why the phone comes with a Wide Angle lens, right?
The Wide Angle lens on the S4 is an 8 Megapixel lens. It does what it is supposed to do; give you a wider field of view. The only problem is you won’t be getting the best colors and the pictures will come out a little washed out with a lot less details.
You can’t do anything else with this lens besides take pictures (you can’t shoot videos with it or take AR shots either) and honestly, I think this is just a fancy thing to have on this phone and not really a necessity.
The Wide Angle lens doesn’t have barrel distortion correction so be ready to get pictures with bending buildings like you’re about to be in a sequel of the Inception movie.
For now, this kind of lens isn’t great on Infinix phones but with time, I know they will start making really good ones.
My take on the cameras on this phone is that, they are good enough for the price of the phone. I mean having four cameras is great, Infinix just needs to improve on their camera game.
Performance and Features
I don’t have a lot of complaints about this phone when it comes to how well it performs. I am using the 6GB of RAM version so maybe it may be a bit better than the 3GB of RAM version.
The Infinix S4 comes with a octa-core CPU measured at 2.0GHz. I did the Antutu Benchmark performance test and it got a score of 79133. Comparing this with like the OnePlus 7 Pro may leave you feeling like this phone is whack.
But remember phones like the OnePlus 7 Pro cost a lot more, so if you want that kind of performance, you’ll have to forget about phones that are relatively wallet/purse friendly.
So, I have been doing some gaming on the phone, playing games like Mortal Kombat and Fury: Survivor. Although Mortal Kombat is around 1.2GB, it plays better than Fury: Survivor, which is just 180MB.
I get some lags on the 180MB game, compared to Mortal Kombat, I haven’t played PUB-G yet so I don’t have anything to say about it. Fury: Survivor plays smooth but there are occasional lags, sometimes you won’t really notice.
I do notice as I go to edit some of the games I play that I upload on my YouTube Channel. Some games just need to be well optimized to run on phones. You can have a phone with the biggest CPU and excessive RAM but as long as the game is not well optimized, you will experience lags.
The phone tends to heat up as I do some heavy gaming, but these games usually need an internet connection, so I have to play them with my mobile data on (not WiFi).
I always use 4G when I game so I can get the best performance. This may be one of the reasons why the phone heats up a lot. I’ll have to play some offline games to see how the phone handles it and update this post later on.
Anyways, moving on, the GPU on this phone is PowerVR Rogue GE820. Not a lot to say here besides it is among the good ones in phones in this price range. It doesn’t give the most detailed graphics in games but it is good enough for those of you who will want a gaming phone without spending a lot.
Talking about the RAM, I think getting the 6GB version is better compared to the 3GB of RAM, I say this because after opening a lot of applications, I usually get around 2.8GB to 2.9GB of RAM used up. This gives all my apps enough room to breathe and roam free.
I don’t usually get apps getting terminated unless I clear the RAM, and if you don’t want to get some apps closed when you clear the RAM, there’s a little padlock icon on the top-right of every app when you open your recent apps.
Tap on it to lock apps you want to keep when you wish to free up your RAM.
For storage you get around 60GB free out of the 64GB the Infinix S4 comes with, for its price range, it is a good offer, the good part is you can expand it with a microSD card with up to 128GB and you don’t even have to give up one of your SIM cards to do that.
64GB of Internal storage is enough for most people, but if you’re looking for something higher, you won’t find it on the S4.
Other performance aspects of the phone are okay, the Speaker at the bottom of the phone is decently loud, but sometimes sounds get distorted. Using headphones improves the loudness and sound quality a lot more.
The earpiece at the top of the phone is also loud enough for phone calls, I haven’t had any issues with it while making phone calls.
The fingerprint scanner is also good, not the most accurate though. I sometimes have to try twice before the phone lets me in. This isn’t frequent so don’t worry about it. About 8 out of 10 times, you will only try it once.
When it comes to the speed of the fingerprint scanner, it is actually really fast, but the animation of the phone can make it seem like the fingerprint scanner is slow. Just a tap and without keeping my finger on the scanner, the phone gets unlocked, with the slow animation of course.
You also get Face Recognition on the Infinix S4, it really works well, even in dark conditions. When the phone notices that you’re in a dark environment, it brightens the screen so your face gets scanned well.
I wouldn’t call this the best security mode for a phone without more security sensors besides just the selfie camera, but I have tried to unlock the phone with my eyes closed but it didn’t unlock, for that, I think you have to appreciate the phone a little more.
Most apps are handled well, they start up really fast and they don’t lag at all, I’ve only had lags when I play games.
Overall, really good performing device.
Operating System
The Operating System you get on the Infinix S4 is XOS 5.0 based on Android 9 (Pie). I got a software update the very first day I got the phone. Besides making the phone perform better the feature you will get if you also update is having an internet speed meter at the notification bar, close to the battery icon.
To turn it off, you’ll just have to go to Settings, tap Network and Internet, finally, disable Status bar network speed display. I usually leave it on, because I don’t want to have to install an app for all that internet speed reading.
Anyway back to the OS itself. You’ll probably find one thing annoying about this operating system, and it is advertisements. I really don’t know why there are a lot of ads here, it’s not like we got the phone for free.
The funny part is there isn’t a really straight forward way to disable them. If you really want to get rid of some of those ads, as a first step, you’ll have to change the launcher of the phone. It’s a good thing we’re allowed to choose the launcher we want.
I always go for NOVA launcher; it’s been the only launcher I have been using since I got my first android phone. It’s clean and doesn’t slow your phone down. But there are other launchers you can install if you have a favorite besides NOVA.
Something else you’ll find annoying is the amount of bloatware you get on the phone. The Infinix S4 comes with a lot of preinstalled applications.
The good part about this is that most of them can be easily uninstalled (they technically aren’t uninstalled because they come back when you reset the phone, they just get completely stopped from working when you “uninstall” them) or disabled.
Well, apart from those negatives, you get a lot of positives. First of all, for System Navigation, you get two options (besides the regular 3 navigation button option). The Gesture Navigation and the Mix Navigation.
With Gesture Navigation, when enabled, swipe up from the bottom center of the screen to go “home”, swipe up from the bottom right to go “back” and finally, swipe up from the bottom left to see your “recent apps”.
Mix Navigation is what I prefer using, you get a pill shaped button on the bottom center of the screen, and a back button (either on the left or right, depends on where you want it). Tap the pill to go home, or swipe up on it to see your “recent apps”. The back button takes you back.
The bottom left of the screen is empty per se but swiping up on it also shows you your recent apps. It works just like Gesture Navigation, but the only difference is you have icons.
If you’re going to be playing a lot of games (like me), I would suggest sticking to Mix Navigation, most games require a lot of swipes, you may end up swiping your way out of a game by accident if you use gesture navigation.
Another really nice feature on the S4 is Smart panel. If you activate it, you’ll get a little area on your screen that you swipe on to access some apps and features, it is customizable but it has a limit. You can’t add more than 3 tools and 9 apps.
You can also choose where you want the button to be by tapping and holding, and then dragging it to where you want.
There are a lot of other features the Infinix S4 offers which I can’t cover, you get Multi-Window, One-hand mode, Bike-Mode, Action and Gesture mode, Themes, Game boost mode, etc. These are things you’ll just have to experience for yourself.
Overall, besides the annoying ads and bloatware, the operating system on this phone is pretty nice. It is running on Android 9 (Pie) so expect to have a lot of recent and updated apps compatible with the phone. Google Security patches also get updated on the phone from time to time.
Battery
The battery on this phone is one aspect of the phone you will be really happy with, it is a 4,000mAh battery.
As a heavy user, I have been able to play a lot of games while also recording them with my mobile network on, and I still manage to make it to the end of the day with around 20% as a worst case.
I tried as hard as I could to completely use up the battery just so I could see how long it took to charge from 0 to 100 and the phone shut down when it was around 2%.
I guess Infinix did this on purpose because technically, it isn’t advisable to completely drain a phone’s battery to 0%. This is because on the long run, the battery will become weaker.
Anyway, charging it from 2% to a 100% took a little over 2 hours. 2 hours and 8 minutes to be precise. The phone hasn’t gotten that low ever since.
You’ll get a 10Watt charger out of the box when you buy this phone. Fast charging is supported even though a lot of reviewers claim it’s not. There’s a trick to making it happen, you’ll have to unplug the charger and plug it back a couple of times till you get “X charge” icon.
Also you’ll have to check the temperature of the charger after about 5 minutes after you connect the phone, if the charger isn’t really warm, then the fast charging hasn’t started yet. You’ll have to unplug and plug again and check after about 3 to 5 minutes.
Yes, it sounds like a lot of work, but if you’ve got time on your hands you can just leave the phone until the charger decides to start fast charging automatically.
So, if battery on a phone is a major deal to you, the Infinix S4 has got you covered. You will be using this phone all day, every day with just one charge a day.
Light users that hardly ever have time for their phones can be rest assured that this phone will last days before they’ll need to charge again.
Connectivity
For internet, you get 4G, 3G, 2G and WiFi.
You also get an FM Radio, Bluetooth, GPS, Micro USB 2.0, etc.
Price
I got this phone for 62,000 Naira.
Click this link to purchase on Jumia.
Conclusion
Overall, the Infinix S4 is a really nice midrange phone that offers a lot, the display is great, the battery is awesome and the phone performs really well when it comes to using your normal social media apps or running some heavy games.
It also has a really nice design and some impressive cameras.
Only problem you will have with this phone is the ads and bloatware you’ll have to get rid of, it doesn’t have a USB Type-C port either. But concerning its price, I say this phone has my recommendation.
Okay guys, that’s it for now, make sure you share, comment and like if you enjoyed the review.
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Until next time, this is Shaibu saying thank you for stopping by and I’ll see you on the next phone. Stay awesome.
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