This phone packs in a lot of  high end-features you will not find in any other handset in the below-Rs 10,000  price band
By Anand Parthasarathy
That classic American stage and screen musical  of  an earlier era, "Annie Get Your Gun!" had a  catchy song whose refrain went: "Anything  you can do, I can do better"!
Infinix is now a respected brand of made-in-India smart phones, and this could well be their  slogan: they have a pattern of watching the latest tech trends in premier  handsets,  then quietly offering them a few months later at a significantly lower price point.
The Infinix S5 Pro lives up to this  tradition.  I am not aware of any other phone today   priced  below the unwritten lakshman rekha of  Rs 10,000 (Rs 9999 to be exact) and offering a 16 megapixel  pop-up selfie camera.
A pop-up camera  involves some complicated mechanics  but the advantage is that  the camera does not take up any space on the screen -- allowing for the largest possible viewing area  -- in this  case all of 6.53 inches in diagonal. It has an auto retract feature-- which means if you accidentally drop the camera when shooting a selfie, the camera will  not  break,  but slide back into safety.
The rear camera is  no slouch eithe  being a  48 MP 3-lens combo with double flash. It offers   AI-backed setting options like night, portrait,  street, night portrait etc  with a    selectable bokeh setting to blur the background  variably for portraits.   With 4 GB RAM and 64 GB ROM, you have  enough storage to last you  years    -- but if you do need extra space, the S5 Pro takes  2 SIMS plus a micro SD card. The OS is the latest Android 10, but Infinix also throws in  the Dolphin XOS 6.0 if you care for some extra frills.
All Android  screens look fairly similar by default, but I liked some useful features like a  button to quickly   display the installed apps in an alphabetical waterfall. One feature that may  not be immediately apparent: the phone has embedded Google Lens in its camera, which means, if you  install Google Assistant, you can leverage many useful camera-driven enhancements  as you point the phone at passing sights. Again this is not a feature you will find in many phones in the mid-priced sub Rs 10K category.
The Dolby DTS-HD sound is loud and clear when you play YouTube  or other videos  -- and the 19.5:9 screen ratio makes it just right to play scaled down  cinematic content.
All-in-all, a phone that offers excellent value and some very useful premium features