Infinix ZERO 30 5G Hands-On, First Impressions

Abe Olandres

Sep 15

Infinix has been on the roll lately with a bunch of really great budget mid-range offerings. The original Infinix ZERO X Pro came out sometime in late 2021 but didn't get much attention. Infinix Zero 5G (see review here) back in February 2022 was a massive success. That was followed by the premium Infinix ZERO Ultra in October of that year, while a refreshed Infinix ZERO 5G 2023 was unveiled the following month.

The Infinix ZERO 30 5G is the successor to last year's ZERO 20 (which was never released in the Philippines). This time around, Infinix is putting a lot of stock on the ZERO 30 5G with some very notable features like a 12GB+9GB RAM and a 50MP vlogging front camera that can shoot 4K @ 60fps.

Our unit is in the Golden Hour colorway, and we must say that it's a very bright and refreshing tone where the back panel changes color as it hits the light at certain angles – it does look like the vibrant colors of the sky at 3 to 5PM where photographers refer to as the golden hour.

The device is pretty solid -- has an all-metal chassis with a glass-on-glass body at the front and back (said to be both Gorilla Glass 5). It is very thin at just 7.9mm and weighs just 185 grams – pretty close to the proportions of the vivo v27 at 7.4mm and 180 grams.

Lots of attention to detail was put in here – volume rocker on the right side together with the power button; one of two speaker grills at the bottom along with the USB Type-C port, SIM card slot, and primary mic; secondary noise-canceling microphone up top along with the second stereo speaker and a fine laser-etching label of "Powered by Infinix" along the side.

There's an under-display fingerprint sensor embedded with the 3D curved display up front. The punch-hole camera is placed at the top middle corner that features a massive 50MP vlogging camera, boasting of 4K at 60fps video recording capability. The screen is full HD+ with bright and crisp images, thanks to AMOLED display and a 144Hz refresh rate.

On the rear side, the frosted glass back panel is smooth but not slippery to the hand. It's also smudge and fingerprint-resistant, which we really appreciate.

Beneath the glass protection, there's a textured coating that variably reflects light and emits different colors depending on the angle of reflection. It's a pretty subtle but nice touch, similar to what we've seen in the vivo V25 and V27 series.

There's a large camera module flaking the upper left side with 3 cameras and an LED ring flash. The camera system is headlined by a 108MP sensor with f/1.75 aperture, phase-detection autofocus and optical image stabilization.

In our limited time with the device, we've taken a few sample shots, as shown in the gallery below.

We'll dive deeper into the triple camera setup of the Zero 30 in our full review, but so far, we're quite impressed with the initial samples we got.

And then, we have that 50MP front camera that can shoot 4k at 60fps. Not a lot of smartphones can shoot at this level, so props to Infinix for pushing this feature.

Powering the Zero 30 5G is a Mediatek Dimensity 8020 chipset, which is composed of a quad-core high-performance ARM Cortex A78 running at 2,6GHz clock speed and another quad-core power-efficient ARM Cortex A55 running at 2.0GHz. This is paired with an ARM Mali-G77 MP9 GPU with 12GB of LPDDR4 RAM and another 9GB of optional Extended RAM.

All considered, the combination of this hardware provides great performance to the Zero 30, especially in gaming. To keep up with the demands of 4K videos, the internal storage here starts at 256GB, although we're quite puzzled with the lack of a microSD card expansion slot to come along with the dual nano SIM trays.

We've also done our initial benchmarks and got these test results:

Antutu Benchmark v10: 695,526
Antutu Storage Test:
Read: 1,884 MB/s
Write: 1,606 MB/s
Random Read: 281 MB/s
Random Write: 324 MB/s
3D Mark - 4,315
Geekbench 6: 990 (Single), 3255 (Multi)
Geekbench 6 GPU: 1,219 (Vulkan), 4190 (OpenCL)
PC Work 3.0 Performance: 13,952

The scores alone tell us this is a pretty capable device and should be a great mid-range gaming smartphone. We also tested a few games for a short while, like Asphalt 9 and Mobile Legends, with excellent results. We've set them to High Quality display and still got good frame rates north of 60fps.

As for connectivity, all you will ever need here are present – dual 5G support, WiFi 6, Bluetooth, GPS, and NFC. For battery, it comes with a generous 5,000mAh capacity with support for 68W Super Charge.

All in all, the Infinix Zero 30 5G is one fine device and we've only played with it for only a couple of days now.

The design, hardware configuration, camera, and battery all check out that you'd think this model is positioned to dish it out against premium mid-range devices in the 20k to 25k price range, but you're only asked to forked out below 15k. Now, if that's not what "bang-for-your-buck" means, then we don't know what else to call it.

INFINIX ZERO 30 5G specs:
6.78-inch FHD+ 144Hz 3D Curved AMOLED Display @ 1080x2400 pixels
Corning Gorilla Glass 5
Mediatek Dimensity 8020
4x ARM Cortex A78 @ 2.6GHz + 4x ARM Cortex A55 @ 2.0GHz
ARM Mali-G77 MP9
12GB RAM (+9GB Extended RAM)
256GB internal storage (no microSD card expansion slot)
Dual nano SIM 5G
108MP f/1.75 PDAF OIS main camera
13MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera
2MP f/2.4 macro camera
50MP front camera, 4K @ 60fps
WiFi-6
Bluetooth 5.3
GPS with aGPS support
XOS 10 (based on Android 13)
5,000mAh Li-Ion battery with 68W Super Charge, PD 3.0, QC 4.0
164.5 x 75 x 7.9 mm (dimensions)
185 grams (weight)