InFocus Turbo 5 Plus Review: Good design, battery and that's about it

It's hard to reminisce the good old days when feature phones or Symbian phones ruled our digital world with so many budget smartphones making their way into the market. We've seen brands like Xiaomi, Lenovo, Motorola, and Nokia bring smartphones with compelling features, changing our outlook on an affordable smartphone.

Infocus, a US-based company is among those disruptive smartphone brands in the affordable range. Since dual cameras are the new rage in the smartphone space, Infocus thought it's wise to bring a smartphone with two cameras, but within the budget targetting the masses.

With that idea came the Infocus Turbo 5 Plus, featuring dual rear camera as its biggest USP. The specs on paper looked fine for a smartphone priced at Rs. 7,999, but does it live up to the expectation of potential buyers? Let's find out.

Design  4.5

In terms of design, InFocus has got the Turbo 5 Plus right. It has a metallic unibody with dual cameras on the back, a physical home button and overall a premium-looking phone. For less than Rs. 10,000, the Turbo 5 Plus has some good face value, but what resides inside matters just as much.

Display  4

There's a 5.5-inch HD display, which is quite decent in terms of colour reproduction and viewing angles. It works surprisingly well under sunlight provided you have the brightness set for maximum. The screen responsiveness is a bit of an issue as we noticed a delay in touch. There is a noticeable lag and scrolling through home screen menus appeared sluggish. But it could be due to the performance of the phone rather than an issue with the display, which we will discuss further down in our review.

Camera  2

Camera is a crucial part of the Turbo 5 Plus, as the dual setup at the back cannot go unnoticed. A combination of 13MP and 5MP sensors for sharp focus and wide-angle shots look good on paper. But when we tested it out, we were disappointed with the results.

If you're looking at the Turbo 5 Plus for its camera, it's not recommended even at such a low price. The colours appear faded in landscape, auto-focus failed to identify the subject and portrait shots are below par. The Bokeh adjustment feature draws a blunt circle around the subject you want to capture and blurs the rest of the image, which is not ideal while shooting let's say a person in close-up.

There is also a wide-angle feature, which expands the coverage area, but fails to capture the details even in good lighting conditions. It's not something we'd expect from a phone with a camera as its biggest USP.

Under low-light, the Turbo 5 Plus struggles to capture a decent shot. Sadly, the handset is not the best camera phone out there but barely makes it to the top 10. 

Performance  2.5

Moving on to the performance, we noticed a lag as we mentioned earlier. The stutter continues in apps like Facebook and even while playing games. For a smartphone that's powered by a MediaTek MTK6750 octa-core chipset, 3GB RAM and Android 7.0 Nougat, we were certainly surprised to witness such a lacklustre performance by the Turbo 5 Plus.

Fingerprint scanner  3.5

Speaking of lags, the phone's fingerprint scanner takes a brief second before unlocking. But it has an accurate reading, earning the phone the most stars in this category. This is surprising considering phones in the same price range like Xiaomi Redmi 4 can do a much better job.

Battery  3

Despite these shortcomings, InFocus Turbo 5 Plus turns out as a winner in terms of battery. With full charge, the handset easily lasts 9-10 hours – and that's with 4G LTE on, messaging, calling, social media browsing, music and games. On a video loop test, the phone lasted 10+ hours, which is quite an impressive feat.

But there's a downside to that as well. It took us 3+ hours to fully charge the device. It's natural to run out of patience while charging the Turbo 5 Plus.

Verdict  3 

InFocus has some interesting and even worthy smartphones in its portfolio, but you'll have to give the Turbo 5 Plus a miss considering its outweighing cons over pros. There are many smartphones like Xiaomi Redmi 4, Redmi Note 4, Nokia 3 and others in the similar price range with worthier features.