Infinix Note 30 review

Design

We would broadly call the Note 30's design classic, yet contemporary. Its flat sides give off a sort of "iPhone" vibe, but Infinix was clearly not going for a carbon copy or anything of the sort. The Note 30 has a look of its own.

We particularly like the back side. Our unit has a glass satin-like finish to it, but you can also get the Note 30 with a leather-like back side if that is more your thing.

The phone is available in a trio of colors: the Interstellar Blue that we have and Magic/Obsidian Black have a glass back, while the Sunset Gold variant has the leather-like one.

There is no camera island as such, but the design team decided to still include an accented area. It has a very subtle rectangle pattern to it that catches all of the surrounding light and sends off colorful reflections. We kind of like how it looks, though some might find it a bit tacky.

The back side doesn't attract or gather dirt at all, but the sides of the Note 30 are a constant mess of fingerprints and grease. Infinix made sure that the plastic there is extremely glossy in order to imitate metal, and to their credit, the effect is convincing. However, you'll never be able to keep the frame of the phone even remotely clean.

The front of the phone is pretty interesting in terms of shape. While the display itself is flat, it quickly tapers off at an angle into the middle frame. There are at least two distinct parts to the whole assembly. Bezels are fairly compact, especially the one above the display. That's quite the achievement, given that it houses a selfie LED flash.

Build quality

The frame on Note 30 is made of plastic, which is not a bad thing in itself. We've sung praises to plastic as a building material in the past and will continue to do so. It is strong yet lightweight, doesn't scratch or dent quite like metal, and doesn't shatter quite like glass.

The phone feels very sturdy and well-made. There is no flex to speak of. The Note 30 is surprisingly well-balanced as well. Its center of mass is almost perfectly down the middle of the phone, which is important for handling. Indeed, the Note 30 handles pretty well.

The Note 30 comes with IP53 ingress protection, which is kind of basic, but still much appreciated at this price point. The surface covering the display is some sort of undisclosed glass, but we would still recommend leaving the factory-pre-applied plastic screen protector in place or replacing it with the included glass one.

Controls

The Note 30 has a pretty standard control set and layout. Well, perhaps, with the exception of the selfie flash, which is located in the right half of the top frame above the display and shines surprisingly bright with its two LED units.

There is nothing else particularly interesting about the front of the phone. The light and proximity sensors are well hidden in the top frame as well. The selfie camera is positioned inside a fairly large punch hole, which is to be expected for this class of device.

To reiterate, we like both the frosted, satin-like finish on the back of our review unit and the colorful accent pattern around the cameras. The cameras themselves don't protrude too much, and the Note 30 can still lay fairly comfortably on a flat surface.

The phone's right side houses the volume rocker and a power button, plus a fingerprint reader combo. These are fairly well-positioned in terms of height. We would have personally preferred them a bit higher up on the frame, but that's nitpicking.

The buttons themselves feel great and are "clicky" with great tactile feedback. The fingerprint reader is excellent, both speedy and accurate. Given the technology's maturity, we would expect nothing less from a capacitive reader.

Additional fingerprint reader features

We also appreciate the addition of quite a few settings and features for the fingerprint reader. For one, you can set whether you want the reader always-on or just triggered by a power button press. Beyond that, the fingerprint reader can be used to access app lock and XHide in the phone OS, but also as a shortcut for things like accepting an incoming call, dismissing an alarm or starting a call recording. Nifty!

The left side of the Note 30 is almost entirely empty, sans the SIM tray. The Note 30 is a dual-SIM device, and the SIM tray houses two nano-SIM cards on one side. On the opposite side, there is a space for a microSD card. This flexibility is great to see, and with a dedicated slot, you don't have to pick and choose between a second SIM card and memory expansion.

The top side of the Note 30 features a subtle "SOUND BY JBL" logo as well as two holes. These appear to be meant as speaker outputs. As far as we can tell, the Note 30 has a hybrid stereo setup with an amplified earpiece acting as the second channel. Infinix seems to have included speaker "holes" facing forward and up in a rather smart move. This contributes to better spatial audio and also makes this loudspeaker hard to fully cover with a palm while handling the phone.

Unfortunately, Infinix didn't employ the same design for the bottom speaker, which is just bottom-firing and doesn't have an output hole facing forward. This also means you can easily cover this speaker with a palm.

The bottom side of the phone is pretty busy. This is where we find the 3.5mm audio jack and the main microphone on the Note 30. Also, the Type-C port is right in the middle.

In case you were wondering, there is no notification LED.

Connectivity

Network connectivity on the Note 30 tops out at 4G/LTE. There is no 5G here. Still, the Note 30 has simultaneous DualSim 4G standby, 4x4 MIMO, VoLTE, and ViLTE support. The Infinix Note 30 also has something Infinix calls "Ultra Powerful Signal", which claims to improve cellular connectivity strength by 20% and Wi-Fi strength by 100% in landscape mode.

For satellite positioning, the Helio G99 chipset supports GPS, QZSS, Galileo, BeiDou and NAVIC.

For local connectivity, there is dual-band Wi-Fi ac and Bluetooth. The Note 30 also has NFC and an FM radio receiver. The Type-C port is expectedly backed up by a USB 2.0 data connection, which means a theoretical maximum data transfer speed of 480 Mbps. There is support for USB Host or OTG. Beyond that, the USB port has no video output or anything else fancy.

The Note 30 has a pretty full set of sensors on board. There is a tdk icm 42631 accelerometer and gyroscope combo, a sensortek stk33562 light and hardware proximity combo and a qst qmc6308 magnetometer and compass combo. There is no barometer on board.