Infinix Zero 30 review

Curved 6.78-inch, 144Hz AMOLED

The display is clearly one of the highlights of the Zero 30. It is pretty large, with a 6.78-inch diagonal. The phone has an advertised screen-to-body ratio of 92.7%, but the display seems larger and more prevalent thanks to its aggressive side curvature. Resolution is 1080 x 2400 pixels, or FHD+. The panel has an advertised maximum brightness of 950 nits and 2160 Hz of PWM for the backlight, also 360Hz touch sampling and a maximum of 144 Hz refresh rate.

In the past, Infinix phones haven't exactly shined (pun intended) in the brightness department In our testing, we measured just 472 nits on the slider and a max auto figure of 764 nits in bright conditions. That's enough to feel comfortable under direct sunlight, but not quite up there with the best screens in 2023.

Thanks to its OLED technology, the panel on the Zero 30 has perfect blacks and technically infinite contrast. It does, however, have a little bit of light bleed at around 3.7 nits at 0% brightness. Not horrible, but not ideal either.

In terms of colors, the Zero 30 has two display modes to work with. One is called "original," while the other is "bright". Both target the DCI-P3 color space and do a pretty decent job regarding coverage, but they aren't particularly accurate out of the box. Original mode gets closer, while bright goes for a "punchier" saturation levels.

Color modes

Thankfully, a color temperature slider is available, and you can warm up the otherwise slightly cold pallet of both modes. Once you do that on the original color mode (about half way on the warm side of the slider), you can end up with nearly perfectly accurate DCI-P3 color reproduction, which is nice to see.

The display on the Zero 30 has no support for displaying HDR. Still, the phone has decoder support for HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG, which it will remap to its display. Just no Dolby Vision.

HDR support • Netflix playback capabilities • DRM info

We are also happy to report that the Zero 30 supports the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing apps like Netflix to offer up FullHD streams to saturate the phone's native resolution.

High refresh rate handling

The display on the Zero 30 5G can refresh at up to 144 Hz. The display supports a total of three refresh rates - 60 Hz, 120 Hz and 144 Hz. There are a total of four refresh rate modes to choose from in settings - 60Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz and Auto-switch.

60Hz mode is the most straightforward, locking the refresh rate at 60 Hz. 120 Hz and 144 Hz modes operate similarly to each other. These have the refresh rate at the highest state (120 or 144 Hz, respectively) while you interact with the display and then quickly lower the refresh rate to 60 Hz to save power.

Zero 30 operating in 144 Hz mode

The phone also appears to be monitoring what is being shown on the display. If substantial motion is noticed, then the refresh rate automatically shoots up to its high state. Unfortunately, these two refresh rate modes do not make any exceptions for video playback, which ends up being done at the highest possible refresh rate instead of 60 Hz, which seems like a needless waste of battery.

The Auto-switch refresh rate mode seems to address some of these issues and is a lot more flexible with its refresh rate states, taking into account what is happening on screen and which application is being used.

Zero 30 5G operating in Auto-switch mode

For instance, certain browsers like Chrome ran at a fixed 60 Hz, and so did the built-in offline video player and the YouTube app. There are still some holes in the logic, like the built-in file manager, which remained in high refresh rate mode even while playing video. The system is not perfect, but is much better than the 144 Hz and 120 Hz modes.

We also tried some high refresh rate gaming on the Zero 30 with solid results. Out of all the games we tried that we know can push past 60fps, only one ended up at a locked 60 Hz (Alto's Adventure), and one ended up always triggering 120 Hz refresh rate (Dead Trigger 2). This was the exact same behavior, regardless of whether we were using the 144 Hz mode or Auto-switching mode in display settings.

High refresh rate gaming

Overall, we were mostly pleased with the way the Infinix Zero 30 handles its refresh rate switching. We recommend always using the default Auto-switching mode to get the best balance of a smooth experience and battery efficiency.

Battery life

The Infinix Zero 30 has a 5,000 mAh battery. The Dimensity 8020 is a reasonably efficient chipset made on a resonably modern 6nm TSMC N6 process node.

The Infinix Zero 30 5G does alright in the battery department without impressing in any particular way. It scored a 102 hour endurance rating in our proprietary test. It did pretty well in the standby and video test portions, but its talk time and web browsing scores leave something to be desired.

As a reminder, the web browsing portion of our testing was conducted at the phone's top 144 Hz refresh rate mode, while the video test part was done at 60 Hz.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage patterns check out our all-time battery test results chart where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging speed

The Infinix Zero 30 is a pretty quick charger. It supports 68W proprietary charging and ships with the appropriate charger and cable in the box. The charger has a few output ratings. It can do a standard 5V@2A, a fixed 11V@6.2A or a variable 4-21V@3.25A.

In our testing, we managed to get the Zero 30 from dead to 44% in 15 minutes and then 72% in 30 minutes. Interestingly enough, while the Zero 30 is faster to charge in both the 15-minute category and a full charge than the Infinix GT 10 Pro, both get basically the same charge in 30 minutes. That's despite the lesser 45W charging rate on the GT 10 Pro.

A full charge on the Zero 30 took us exactly 51 minutes. After that, the phone automatically disconnects itself from the charger (not physically, of course) and starts slowly discharging, which is great for long-term battery health if you are the kind of person to leave your phone charging overnight.

Speakers

The Infinix Zero 30 has stereo speakers with one bottom and one top-firing speaker. That's great to see and quite rare in this price bracket. The speakers managed a "GOOD" score in our loudness test.

The Zero 30 also has DTS support. It offers pretty clean audio output with crisp mids and nice, low-distortion highs.

The DTS sound menu on the Zero 30 5G includes a total of four sound presets - Smart, Music, Video and Game.

DTS equalizer

There is a manual equalizer available for further tuning. It's not something you see that often on a budget device.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.