InFocus Turbo 5 Plus review: Good battery, dual camera not so much

InFocus Turbo 5 Plus review: With the InFocus Turbo 5 Plus, the company aims to gain a market share in the overcrowded budget smartphone market.

InFocus Turbo 5 is the company’s first smartphones to feature a dual camera setup on the back. However, the dual camera setup on the back is not the USP of the device, but rather it is the 4,850mAh battery. With the InFocus Turbo 5 Plus, the company aims to gain a market share in the overcrowded budget smartphone market. Various companies have smartphones filling up the Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 price bracket like Xiaomi, Motorola, Coolpad, Lenovo, etc.

Not all of these players are offering a dual camera setup in the smartphones in this price range yet, but phones like Redmi 4, Redmi Note 4 have done extremely well in the market. So is the InFocus Turbo 5 Plus a good budget device? Here’s our review.

InFocus Turbo 5 Plus Specifications: 5.5-inch 720p HD display | MediaTek MTK6750 processor | 3GB RAM+32GB storage | 13MP rear camera + 5MP set up and 5MP front camera | 4850 mAh battery | InLife UI 2.0 on top of Google’s Android 7.0 Nougat|

InFocus Turbo 5 Plus Price in India: Rs 8,999

InFocus Turbo 5 Plus

InFocus recently launched its Turbo 5 smartphone and the company claims to have sold over 1,00,000 units of this in the Indian smartphone market. Turbo 5 Plus is the successor to that smartphone and comes with a metal back plate with the bottom lip of the back and the frame being made out of plastic. The plastic used on the phone makes it feel a bit cheap.
The dual camera on the back sits on the top left corner of the device along with the dual tone LED flash. The setup includes a wide angle lens paired with a telephoto lens so that the device is able to take ‘bokeh’ images of the subject. The fingerprint sensor has been embedded into the home button on the front.

The USP of the smartphone is its battery, which lasted a full day on a single charge with heavy usage.

There is only a mono-speaker housed in the right grille. There is a micro-USB port for charging and data transfer. On the top edge of the device is 3.5mm audio jack. The company has added a dual-hybrid SIM slot in the device, which will either accept one nano-SIM and micro-SIM card or one nano-SIM card along with a microSD card of up to 32GB. The smartphone is heavy compared to the competition like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4. As for the design, it seems like any other device, as this has become an industry standard device design.

What’s good?

On the front, we get to see a 5.5-inch 2.5D Curved HD display with a resolution of 720×1080 pixels. The display is quite decent and there were no problems using this under direct sunlight either. The display seems of top quality and is able to reproduce colours accurately. However, you would have to get over the fact that the adaptive brightness is way off and most of the times you will have to manually adjust the brightness levels to suit your eyes.

When it comes to performance, InFocus Turbo 5 Plus scored 40,483 on Antutu, on GeekBench 4 it scored 617 in the single-core test while it scored 2,520 in the multi-core test.

The USP of the smartphone is its battery, which lasted a full day on a single charge with heavy usage. The device took around three to four hours to fully charge with the charger provided in-the-box. I watched a lot of content on YouTube, used the device for navigational purposes, and played a few games on it while testing it out.

When it comes to performance, InFocus Turbo 5 Plus scored 40,483 on Antutu, on GeekBench 4 it scored 617 in the single-core test while it scored 2,520 in the multi-core test. The phone’s performance as per our experience was mediocre, if you start comparing it to more high-end phones. However, for this price range the InFocus Turbo 5 Plus is an okay device. For regular usage, multi-tasking, etc the phone should be good enough for most users.

Turbo 5 Plus is the successor to that smartphone and comes with a metal back plate with the bottom lip of the back and the frame being made out of plastic.

But heavy-duty games like Asphalt 8 did not perform well on this phone and there was a noticeable lag and frame drop during the gameplay. Still the device was able to keep its cool and did not heat up much while we were playing the game.

What’s not good?

The camera delivers good images in good lighting conditions, but there are too many problems in this department. For starters, the camera does not perform so well in low-light. Also there’s a serious issue when it comes to the focus of the camera. In my experience, this was really bad and a user will have to focus again and again, just to get the image focus right.

Frankly the ‘bokeh’ mode just doesn’t deliver on the quality of images and it was struggle to take even one picture. I had to keep taking shots on loop, just to get the right focus on the object in this mode, which is not at all impressive. The front camera is not that good either, and you won’t like it much if you take a lot of selfies.

InFocus Turbo 5 Plus camera sample. (Image resized for web) InFocus Turbo 5 Plus camera sample. (Image resized for web) InFocus Turbo 5 Plus camera sample. (Image resized for web)

The user interface on the InFocus Turbo 5 Plus is not that user-friendly. The InLife UI 2.0 skin the company uses is difficult to use and has a steep learning curve. The on-screen navigation buttons show up in a black bar making the bezel, which is already big, look a lot bigger. The company also embedded a fingerprint sensor into the home button which also doubles as a back button and might confuse the users a lot.

The speakers provided on the device are also not so powerful. While watching videos on the loudspeaker, I would sometimes miss a word or two due to the poor quality of the speakers.

Verdict

InFocus Turbo 5 Plus’ USP has to be the battery life. The dual-rear camera doesn’t really work so well as I experienced. In the budget category, it is offering a lot in terms of hardware, but the Turbo 5 Plus has a lot of competition from various other brands like Xiaomi, Lenovo, Motorola, etc.

In terms of build quality, performance and camera, InFocus Turbo 5 Plus doesn’t really deliver that well, though the display and battery are quite good. It is hard to recommend this phone given the number of flaws and the fact that the competition has much better devices on offer.