Infinix Hot 40 Pro review

Android 13 on top of XOS 13.5

One of the Hot 40 Pro's main drawbacks is the out-of-the-box Android version. The device was released in December 2023, so the company had plenty of time to adapt the Hot 40 Pro to the latest Android 14. However, the device is still on Android 13 with an incremental update to its proprietary XOS 13..5 software.

XOS 13.5 itself isn't a big departure from the XOS 13-running Infinix GT 10 Pro we reviewed last year.

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 a powerful Theming engine wiht an online Theme repository .

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 and 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.

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

Speaking of notifications, a new addition to XOS is the so-called Magic Ring, which is a IInfinix' version of Apple's Dynamic Island. It's rather limited in functionality but sometimes gives useful contextual information. For instance, the pop-up will expand when charging or when the system is trying to find your face for a facial unlock.

Magic Ring

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-Window feature for multi-tasking

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.

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

There are options of dubious usefulness. The Infinix Hot 40 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 gaming 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 Hot 40 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 Hot 40 Pro employs the Helio G99 chipset. It's a 6nm chip from Mediatek with a 2+6 core CPU configuration (2x2.2GHz Cortex-A76 and 2x2.0GHz Cortex-A55) and a Mali-G57 MC2 GPU. The version we have has 128GB of UFS 2.2 storage and 8GB of RAM.

And now, let's look at some performance benchmarks.

The Helio G99-powered Inifinx Hot 40 Pro performs just as expected and comfortably sits at the middle of most charts. In other words, performance is just about average. There are a couple of similarly priced handsets with better performance, running on 5G-capable chipsets, such as the Moto G54 Power with Dimensity 7020 or the Snapdragon 4 Gen 1, in some cases, but the difference is rather negligible.

When it comes to sustained loads, the Hot 40 Pro performs excellently, although we weren't expecting anything less than that. The Helio G99 chip isn't hard to keep running at maximum loads as it's not a demanding piece of hardware to begin with. Inner and outer temperatures were ideal, and there were no sudden drops in performance.

CPU throttle test after 60 min

The external cooling fan, while pretty neat, doesn't contribute much as the device is perfectly capable of managing the inner and outer temperatures on its own.