Recently InFocus launched two smartphones in Indian market – M350 and M530 with price tag of Rs. 6999 (starting) and Rs. 10,999 respectively. Before we move further, i would like to tell that it’s an American company not Chinese. Yes, InFocus is an American company but the smartphones are manufactured in China. It’s in smartphone market since 2013 offering budget high-specification smartphones in partnership with the Foxconn in China. It is relatively a new brand for Indian users.
InFocus M350 Review
Design and Build
This is what we liked the most, InFocus M350 has got a good build for the price with plastic body, plastic chassis. It has also got shiny steel finished metal rim around the display which looks cool. The front of the InFocus M350 is all black which packs a 5-inch 720p display with a 8-megapixel front facing camera, a tiny coloured-LED notification light, ear piece grill, proximity sensor & light sensor on top and three capacitive touch screen buttons & InFocus branding at bottom. For us, the design is not so good with huge bezels on top and bottom which makes the phone taller than it should have. It makes it look dull.
Left side of the smartphone have volume rocker and on the right side it have the power/lock button on the steel finished metal rim around the display. While using it, sometimes we felt we need to put extra effort on buttons while adjusting volume, power/lock button is better though.
On top of the device is a 3.5mm audio jack and the bottom have the Micro-USB charging/ data port.
Back of the handset have Camera placed in center with an LED flash and a noise cancellation mic on top of the camera module. Below camera it features InFocus branding. The smartphone looks good from back and it provides good grip. At the bottom, it have speaker grill with three pin holes. Overall, it looks good from back.
The company has done a good job considering the build of InFocus M350 but the design isn’t that good, it looked outdated to us.
Display
It comes with a 5-inch HD (720×1280 pixels) IPS display with On-cell display technology. It offers a pixel density of 294ppi. The display looked good to us for its good contrast ratio. It is well saturated too.
The anti-smudge coating works well and doesn’t attract many scratches or fingerprints. Screen brightness and different viewing angles are fine too but under direct sunlight you might face difficulty. You also get the Bluelight Filter and Color Temperature tweaks. Overall, the display is good and satisfactory. During out review it didn’t get many scratches but a screen guard is recommended.
Performance
The InFocus M350 isn’t as good as the Yu Yureka or Lenovo A6000(+) but it did a fair job. It packs a 1.5GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6732 processor with Mali-T760 GPU and 2GB of RAM which is quite handy for multi tasking and gaming. You get around 1.1 gb of free ram which let you run different apps in background without any problems. We tried few heavy games with great graphics and they ran smoothly without problems. The best thing is, it doesn’t get over heated like other smartphones in this segment while multitasking and playing heavy games.
Talking about audio/video playback, it did a decent job in all departments which was quite satisfying. Audio quality was loud and good quality. We didn’t get the standard pair of headphones with the review device so we used only ours while reviewing. It also includes OTG support which is good.
Talking about benchmarks, it got 32124, 56, 10229, 717 on Antutu Benchmark 5, NenaMark 2, Quadrant Benchmark, Basemark OS II respectively.
OS/Software
The InFocus M350 runs on Android 4.4.4 KitKat. It is powered with company’s InLife UI skinned on top. We aren’t sure if the smartphone will every get Android 5.0 Lollipop, but it seems unlikely. The icons looks like the iOS icons with stock Android drawer. The good thing, it doesn’t come with too many preloaded apps or bloatware. You get approx. 12 gb storage of 16gb internal memory which is quite good. You can also use external storage of upto 64gb.
Camera
This is what we were excited about but we can say it didn’t live upto our expectations. The smartphone packs an 8-megapixel auto focus rear camera with BSI sensor, LED Flash and f/2.2 aperture. It didn’t prove to be even an average performer. The shots taken from it were either underexposed or overexposed. The images taken in HDR shots came out surprisingly nice but images taken in daylight in ‘Normal mode’ were below par. You don’t get many custom settings options and the images taken in low-light were poor.
However, the front camera is good. Selfies taken with it came out nicely but considering its 8-megapixel sensor, it could have been better.
Battery & Connectivity
The smartphone packs a 2500mAh non-removable battery which provided a 12 hr backup with bit of browing, some gaming and the normal social networking. What we didn’t like is the slow charging, it charge damn slow which is quite annoying.
The handset can accommodate two Micro-SIM cards with one slot for 4G LTE connectivity and other supports 2G. These can be located beneath the removable back panel along with one microSD card slot.
Verdict
After testing it for a week or so, in our opinion the InFocus M350 is a decent smartphone but not great. It will not be our first choice in this segment and price range. However, if you are looking for a smartphone with good build, display, expandable memory, OTG support then it isn’t a bad choice either but you can get more from other smartphones in same price range like Lenovo A6000 Plus, Yu Yureka and Lenovo A7000.
Pros:
- Good Build
- Good Display
- Expandable memory with microSD card
- USB OTG support
- Good Ram
Cons:
- Outdated old design
- Poor camera
- Battery (very slow charging)
Note: The images used in this article are Media images not captured by us.