Infinix GT 10 Pro review

Pure XOS 13 with Android 13

Infinix boost Android 13 with the company's proprietary XOS 13 skin on top. Infinix brands this gaming iteration of the software as Pure XOS, although there are few difference between this version and what you'd get on a regular Infinix phone.

The manufacturer promises one major Android update and two years of security patches. That's below the industry's standard these days, where midrangers are often treated with at least two major updates while flagships tend to have three or more guaranteed OS upgrades.

Infinix says its main focus when creating XOS was to stick to the vanilla Android aesthetics as much as possible and keeping the bloatware to minimum. The reality is that you get a whole lot of pre-installed apps, while the whole UI and iconography is deeply customized.

The good news is XOS 13 works smoothly, with no hiccups or stutters, despite the influx of apps. So Infinix has done its job pretty well on that front.

Customization runs deep. Starting from the lock screen, where you get an optional Magazine service. Beyond that, there is powerful Theming engine, wiht an online Theme repository . There are plenty of Always-on display customizations as well.

Customization options

The home screen includes a custom feed as the leftmost desktop pane and big folders to organize and categorize your shortcuts by default. There is an alphabetized app drawer with a search bar and recent apps UI as well. There is no way to disable the app drawer if you'd like to go to a flat interface though.

Home screen, app drawer

You do get extremely extensive home screen customization. You can tweak things like grid size, gestures, notification badges. You can even switch to vertical rather than horizontal scrolling for the homescreen and change the text color.

Home screen customizations

The notification shade and control center are separated into two separate entities, just like MIUI. Notifications are called up with a swipe down from the top left of the phone, while a top-right swipe reveals quick toggles and other controls.

Notification shade and quick toggles

Lightning Multi-Window is a floating app window implementation. Far from the best we've seen in terms of window management, but you can open a bunch of windows rather than being limited to one or two.

Multi-tasking features

The Smart Panel feature is Infinix's name for the side bar functionality. It's among the more customizable implementations of this feature that we have seen.

Social Turbo houses a whole slew of powerful features meant to work on top of WhatsApp and enhance its factory experience.

Social turbo features

You get optional extra gestures, app cloning, known as XClone, as well as some gimmicks like Peek Proof, which "hides" parts of the screen to enhance your privacy in busier environments.

Special features and gestures

We couldn't help but notice that MOL - the offline, system-wide translation engine that was once part of XOS is now absent. It seems to have transitioned into something called Folax Translate, which is a part of the company's AI assistant, but since the functionlaity is all there we won't complain.

There is a system-wide Game Mode toggle and a Game Mode setting menu to tweak resource manament.

Game mode

There are options of dubious usefulness GT 10 Pro comes with Monster Game Kit and Dar-Link, which promise AI-driven optimization of games, including frame rate stability, decreasing touch latency and managing hardware performance and temperature. The Game Mode menu is where Bypass Charging lives as well.

The XArena app is a game launcher, complete with various tweaks, like notification suppression. Once you add an app to XArena and start it from there, you also get an in-game toolbar with convenient shortcuts, including floating app support.

XArena app

Infinix even includes a key mapping option for its volume up and down keys. You can have these translate to on-screen inputs, which is a way to make the GT 10 Pro more of a gaming phone even though it doesn't have shoulder trigger keys.

If we had to sum up the experience with XOS, we would say it is pleasantly fluentt from a performance standpoint but quite chaotic. Infinix needs to do some debloating and organization. For the most part, you can do that yourself with a bit of time and tweaking, and the end result could be a solid Android 13 experience. However, it's up to Infinix to do things better out of the box and save each individual user the trouble.

Synthetic benchmark tests

The Infinix GT 10 Pro uses a Mediatek Dimensity 8050, which technically is a brand new 6nm chip, announced in May this year. Once you scratch the surface, however, the Dimensity 8050 is almost identical to the Dimensity 1300, which in turn doesn't really differ from the Dimensity 1200.

The Dimensity 8050 has four fast Cortex-A78 cores and four efficient Cortex-A55 cores. The Cortex-A78 units are actually divided between 1 Super Core running at up to 3GHz, and three Performance Cores ticking at up to 2.6GHz. There is a Mali-G77 MC9 GPU inside the chip. It is paired with 8GB of physical RAM and 512GB of non-expandable storage.

Here's how it fares in our synthetic benchmark tests.

Judging by the benchmarks, the Dimensity 8050 is fully utilized and it performs on par with the Dimensity 1300 SoC, as we expected. That's enough to give the GT 10 Pro a significant edge over its competitors in terms of both CPU and GPU prowess.

Sustained and gaming performance

Although the GT 10 Pro boasts some additional cooling hardware, notably a vapor chamber, we are not impressed with its sustained performance. The CPU throttled within 30 minutes and maintained about 70% of its maximum performance throughout the rest of the test. While not a bad number on its own, you have to consider that the Dimensity 8050 SoC isn't exceptionally powerful, so a dedicated gaming phone should have easily handled it at close to full capacity for the entire test.

On the other hand, we are happy to see a smooth graph without too much fluctuation. This means you can rely on fairly consistent and predictable performance.

CPU throttle test: 30 min • 60 min

Since the handset is made of plastic, the sufrace area remained pretty cool throughout the whole test, which could be part of the reason why the CPU got too hot - heat dissipation isn't ideal.

Arguably the greatest issue with the gaming credentials of the GT 10 Pro was we weren't able to run any games at 120Hz, even the ones we know can go beyond 60fps. Even if you force 120Hz from the display settings you are still limited to 60fps, meaning the gaming credentials are really skin-deep with this one.