The makers,  Transsion Group, have their  sharp sight on the galloping demand of students  taking  online classes
Anand Parthasarathy
August 1 2020: As I have remarked when reviewing an earlier handset – the Infinix Hot 9 –the parent company Transsion which makes its phones in India, has a canny sense of the market here. The Hot 9 was an answer to the very desi craze to view movies on phone.
With the Smart 4 Plus, which goes on sale this week, the company has again absorbed lessons from the prolonged Covid -19 shut downs   and come up with a canny solution to a challenge faced by millions of young Indians: How to follow their school work online, while sitting at home. Transsion realised that for the vast majority, a laptop or desktop PC was out of reach… the best that parents could afford was a handphone.
So, here is the Smart 4 Plus, in answer to this demand: a smartphone that is as large as it gets:  at 6.82 inches with a very generous screen to body ratio and the front camera accommodated in a drop notch, this is a 7-inch phablet, almost.  Having gone as far they could go, screen-size-wise, the makers then added a jumbo battery: 6000 mAH, unheard of in phones priced below the Rs 10,000 mark. Effectively this means the user can play video or surf the Net for almost a full 24-hour day …. And for less image-intense use, the phone works for a day and a half without a recharge.
 This combo of huge screen and big battery makes the Smart 4 Plus the answer to every school child’s prayer (rather the parents’ prayer!). 
Other specs are very similar to the Hot 9: an 8 MP front camera with a good wide view and some 18 vanity settings for your selfie; a 13 MP rear camera with a strong triple flash; 3 GB RAM and 32 GB storage which can be expanded with a 256 GB micro SD card.  The Helio A 25 octa core processor is perfectly adequate to the use cases of this phone – general interest, binge video watcher or student.
I like it that Infinix attends to the small details: two SIM slots, both ready for a VoLTE service as well as  VoWIFI, both of which allow users to save significantly on the data bill – again an important consideration for student use.  As always Infinix throws in high end features like finger print and face lock for access control. The OS is the latest Android 10 with an over lay of the company’s own XOS 6.2 Dolphin which you can use or discard.
When I joined the virtual media briefing for this device 2 weeks ago, , I hazarded a guess that at any price below Rs 10,000, this would be very sound value. When it went on sale a few days ago at Flipkart, the asking price of the Infinix Smart 4 Plus,  was Rs 7999.  I was way off – and happy to be so: this is one of the best deals in smart phones this year, even as it caters to a an urgent and current need.