I have been using Infinix NOTE 40 Pro for a few weeks, and I can confidently tell you that I am impressed. The phone has a new magnetic wireless charging pad, an IR remote control sensor which is very good news, a very big camera sensor among some other high specs that I will talk about in this review. You can watch my full video review below.
Unboxing & Design
The Infinix NOTE 40 Pro comes with a MagPad wireless charger, 70-watt charger, USB Cable, USB Type C headset, Magpad phone case, a curved screen protector and finally some stickers and a SIM Ejector tool. With a price tag of KES 38,699 the Infinix Note 40 Pro at the moment is the cheapest device to come with magnetic wireless charging. Well, apart from the Infinix NOTE 40.
The phone case has the same colour as the phone and it blends in quite nice. From afar you can’t tell that the phone case is installed. I prefer this style of phone case to the clear phone cases that usually become yellowish with time. With the phone case the phone weighs 208 grams and 188 grams without. Without this phone case the MagPad won’t stick to the smartphone.
I have the vintage green version of the beautifully designed NOTE 40 Pro with the gold camera bump and leather like back surface on both the phone and the phone case. The curved display and back cover converge on the slim and shiny gold edges. Even the power and volume buttons are gold.
At the bottom we have the SIM tray which can hold two Nano SIM cards, the microphone, USB port and a speaker outlet. At the top there’s a secondary speaker and microphone as well as the IR sensor. The sound on the NOTE 40 Pro is powered by JBL sound and it’s quite loud and clear.
I love the introduction of the Infra-Red sensor which means that you can now control most devices with the NOTE 40 Pro. You don’t need to download any other third party application since this function is found on the drop down menu. Setting it up is quite easy and I got it to work with my TV and home theater as well. No matter the brand or device you want to control be it the air conditioning, sound bar, camera or electric fan. You can now do it with the NOTE 40 Pro.
Camera
The triple camera comprises of a big 108MP lens followed by a 2MP Macro and 2MP AI Lens. At the front is a 32MP lens with LED flash. By default the video mode is set to 1080p at 30fps but the maximum video quality is 2K at 30 fps which fairly OK. The phone can also do 1080p at 60fps.
There’s no stabilization at the highest setting so the stabilized smooth footage quality is 1080p. Here is a sample with stabilization ON and OFF. The stabilized footage is zoomed in a little bit and is much better than when the setting is OFF. You can watch the difference in the video above.
The Super night shots are so much better than when the setting is not selected. There’s a very big difference.
The front 32MP lens takes very nice and detailed selfies as well as fantastic portrait selfies.
Display
The display is a 6.78 Inch or 172.2 mm 3D curved AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It has a Full HD+ resolution of 2436*1080 making it a great device for gaming and consuming media content. It’s also very bright even in direct sunlight.
What else does the display have? Well an in display fingerprint scanner which is very fast.
Performance & Software
When it comes to software and performance? TheHOT 40 Pro comes with XOS Version 14 which is based on Android 14 Operating system. The user interface is clean and I didn’t have to disable like a hundred Ad notifications. I like it this new XOS experience. It is equipped with a Helio G99 processor with 8 gigabytes of RAM. This RAM can be expanded to 16GB by taking a piece of the 256 GB ROM.
This combination makes the applications start up very fast. It also enables faster switching between apps which are just in the background at exactly where you left off. That’s right, I didn’t have to go through those few seconds when the app restarts after switching therefore losing your progress. This is very important for offline gaming, you will always return to the exact moment you left off.
Battery & Charging
The 5000mAh battery is a long-lasting battery. It took me 4 days to delete my battery in between my wired and wireless charging experiments. If you’re using the device as you charge, then the NOTE 40 Pro has a system of bypassing the battery and powering the motherboard directly. This has the advantage of preventing overheating and prolonging the battery life as you watch your videos or play your favourite games. This system is known as bypass charging and you need to turn it ON in the Charging settings to enjoy its benefits.
I conducted a charging experiment, and I got up to 25% in 10 minutes, 69% in half an hour and full battery capacity in 50 minutes using the 70 watt wired charger. What about the MagPad?
Well, I got 10% in 10 minutes, 28% in half an hour, 89% in 2 hours and full battery in 2 hours and 19 minutes. The wireless MagPad was 51 minutes faster than the wireless charging on the Infinix NOTE 30 VIP.
I want to add that the MagPad is not that heavy and you can use the device as you charge. It doesn’t over heat as I recorded a temperature of only 35 Degrees Celsius.
Reverse Charging
With a USB Type C cable, you can charge another smartphone or peripheral device with wired reverse charging. Also, with wireless reverse charging you can charge your smart watch or even another phone. To turn on reverse wireless charging go to settings, battery and power saving, charge and reverse wireless charging. From here you just have to turn the option ON.
In conclusion, the Infinix NOTE 40 Pro is a great smartphone with excellent performance and also takes very nice quality videos. I just wish that it could record videos up to 4K with that massive sensor.