Verdict
Infinix does a great job of fooling passersby into thinking you spent a whole lot more than you did with the Note 40 Pro Plus. But, while enjoyable to use, it can feel like it’s you, the buyer, that’s getting played in a couple of areas.
Pros
- Attractive curved glass design
- Fairly bright screen
- Reasonably affordable
Cons
- So-so processor has weak gaming power
- Weak processor lacks Vulkan support
- Has two junk cameras
- 100W charging claim is tenuous
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100W charging + 20W wirelessCabled charging can reach 100W according to Infinix’s specs, and 20W wireless charging is supported too — unusual at the price. -
108MP cameraThis phone has a 108MP primary camera. While standard photos are captured at 12MP, the high res sensor design does wonders for the 3x digital zoom mode. -
Curved displayA curved OLED screen and curved glass cover gives the phone an expensive appearance, and slimmer feel.
Introduction
The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus is a $309 phone dressed up in the garb, features and terminology of a top-price one.
Its look is that of a curved metal and glass flagship. But there’s actually a good deal of plastic to the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus.
Infinix boasts of an OIS zoom camera, but when you look closer you realise the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus doesn’t actually have one. This is a fake it ‘til you make it phone. But the illusion it attempts to create is remarkably persuasive.
However, a few too many of the final touches aren’t quite nailed well enough to earn an unreserved recommendation. The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus can’t keep up with the competition on night-time photography, or raw performance — app loads can feel a touch slow.
Design
- Curved Gorilla Glass screen
- Feels slim and svelte for its display size
- Optional fake leather rear
Phone designs are pretty boring these days. They have been for years. But one of my favourite phone design trends is represented in the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus: bringing down the design language of previous flagship generations to lower-cost mobiles.
The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus has slim screen borders, curved front glass and a curved display. Not everyone loves these non-flat screens, as they pool reflections. But I still find myself charmed into thinking they are more “luxury” or expensive than the traditional flat style, all these years on.
It also comes with a tapering effect that makes phones like the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus feel super-slim. Curved back, curved front means you never truly feel the full thickness of the phone. And even if you did, it’s only 8.1mm thick anyway.
The illusion doesn’t bear too much scrutiny, though. The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus has metallic-looking sides, but they are plastic. There’s a fake leather effect on the back of the phone but, as is the norm, this is a plastic treatment. It feels good, though, and the combination of the green and gold pops without seeming too much of an attention-grabber. Just don’t expect the high-end style to extend far below the surface.
For example, the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus only has minimal water resistance of IP53, meaning it can handle a bit of rain but not a whole lot more.
The screen protection is industry standard Corning Gorilla Glass, but the lack of specificity over the generation used suggests it’s probably not top-end Victus-series protection. I have already managed to put a scratch in the display glass.
Similarly, the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus has JBL-branded stereo speakers, but they are simply not that great. There’s no lower-frequency punch, meaning voices sound relatively thin, even though the maximum volume and sound projection are decent.
Infinix even chucks in an IR blaster, but as there’s no app, you have to download your own.
Inifinix has tried to do a lot here, even if all of it isn’t necessarily executed to the very highest standard. But other extras are wholesale positives. The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus has a decent in-screen fingerprint scanner that reacts quickly and reliably, and there’s an unusual little LED porthole on the back.
This can light up with a colour or colour sequence of your choosing, when notifications come in, when you play music or use the voice assistant. Each of these can be toggled.
It looks neat, but Infinix doesn’t get close to making it feel actually useful. You can’t set different colours for different contacts, or for different apps’ notifications. It looks neat, but is largely a gimmick.
Screen
- OLED display panel
- Good maximum brightness
The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus has a 6.78-inch curved OLED screen. Thanks to the curved sides, the phone feels highly compact given the screen size.
This is a 2436 x 1080-pixel display with a standard punch-hole selfie cutout at the top. Maximum brightness is very good, the top refresh rate is 120Hz, and as an OLED, contrast is fantastic.
There are two minor niggles, and I don’t think most people should worry about them too much. The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus has two colour modes, but both of them are quite “hot” in terms of colour. Infinix’s website suggests the pretty punchy-looking DCI P3 is the colour target here, and there’s no option to tone things down a bit and take the energy down a notch.
Areas of white also take on a slight blueish colour skew when viewed from an angle. It used to be a common effect among phone OLEDs, and still is reasonably common in these “flexible” curved screens.
The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus does support HDR, though, and aside from having no option for subtler colour, you don’t miss out much here compared to a far more expensive phone.
Camera
- Uses digital 3x zoom, but the results are OK
- Mediocre very-low-light pics
- Limited video modes
Infinix is arguably deceptive in how it describes the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus’s camera. It talks about a “Super Zoom” camera, but there is in fact no zoom camera. And among the three rear cameras, only one is remotely capable.
The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus has a 108MP primary camera with OIS, a 2MP macro and a 2MP depth camera. There isn’t even an ultra-wide. It’s one ordinary camera, which doubles as the “Super Zoom”, and two bits of filler fluff.
Infinix reportedly uses the Samsung HM6 sensor for the 108MP camera, a chip seen in phones at a similar price (and often lower), not mega-price flagships.
You can tell in the pictures, much as the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus is perfectly capable of capturing lovely images. The Samsung Galaxy A55 I reviewed beforehand wipes the floor with the Infinix when shooting in ultra-low light.
Where Samsung can tease out a serviceable image in near-darkness, the Infinix will serve up a near-black scene, despite having an ultra-night mode. It can also struggle to render reds well, which I find to be the most troublesome colour for these lower-spec sensors.
There are some nice surprises, though. The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus’s digital zoom mode is remarkably good, despite having no dedicated hardware to feed off.
The phone asks you to keep the phone still while shooting, suggesting it may use a technique similar to Google’s Super Zoom. This is where the OIS (optical image stabilisation) motor is used to fractionally move the sensor between multiple exposures. Or it could simply be Infinix making the most of the sensor’s full 108MP resolution.
You can also shoot “normal” 108MP photos, which look a lot more detailed than the standard 12MP ones up close, but have more noise and grain.
Faking a 3x zoom camera this effectively is a victory. But the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus is ultimately not hugely competitive because of its lack of useful secondary cameras.
Video is super-limited too. There’s no 4K mode. 2560 x 1440 pixels is the max shooting resolution, and this is limited to 30fps. The 32MP selfie camera is respectable, and uses its high resolution for pixel binning, to help retain some detail integrity in poor light.
Performance
- Largely fine everyday performance
- Quite weak GPU
- Reportedly flaky Vulkan support
The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus uses the MediaTek Dimensity 7020 processor. It’s a lower-end chipset from one of the less trendy, if still massive, manufacturers.
I’ve been highly impressed by some of the chipsets from the Dimensity series over the last couple of years. But this one is less notable.
Its CPU performance is limited, as the gaming power is nothing special even at the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus’s aggressive pricing. The lack of full Vulkan API support is what I find eye-opening.
This means I couldn’t even perform one of our usual 3D Mark mobile phone tests, and that some games flat-out may not work. That said, the game I usually use to test Vulkan support, Ark: Survival Evolved, works fine on the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus.
Its gaming performance seems roundly comparable to that of the Snapdragon 765 according to benchmarks. This used to be one of my favourite processors for moderately affordable mid-range phones. But that was back in 2020.
Don’t buy an Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus if you’re a big mobile gamer, or are highly sensitive to some slight day-to-day performance issues. When I first started using the phone, I noticed a step down in app load speeds from the Samsung Galaxy A55. But I can’t say it’s something that’s stuck out much in the weeks following. Using this phone is largely a pleasant experience.
Software
- Poor custom apps
- Quite a lot of bloatware
- Interface basics are mostly fine
The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus runs Android 14 and has a custom interface called XOS. This determines how the phone’s top layer looks and feels.
Its extreme basics are fine. You can use gesture or soft key navigation, there’s a classic vertical-scrolling app drawer. It’s all ordinary stuff.
However, everything Infinix has done beyond this is either questionable or bad. For example, links you’re sent are opened in the Hola Browser. It’s dreadful, and seems to take an interminable time to load up those links compared to Chrome.
The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus comes with a rubbish AI digital assistant called Rolex. There’s a trash-filled app store called Palm Store. And the photo gallery is, for some reason, called AI Gallery.
I wouldn’t recommend using any of the bloatware installed here, and there’s a lot of it, bar perhaps XTheme. This provides wallpapers and themes, for a quick phone revamp for those without requiring much technical knowledge. Still, as usual, most of them will look far worse than the default theme, which is perfectly good-looking.
I’m also not a fan of the way the Notifications and feature toggle drop-downs are handled. Infinix uses a Xiaomi-style arrangement where you flick left and right between them. It doesn’t work well.
Battery life
- 100% charge within 30 minutes
- Supports wireless charging
- Unremarkable battery life
Battery tech and CPU are largely what separates the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus from the standard Note 40 Pro. This phone supports faster 100W charging (versus 70W) but has a lower-capacity battery, 4600mAh in place of 5000mAh.
I find this trend of giving faster-charging phones smaller batteries frustrating, particularly when the Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus is no thinner than the Infinix Note 40 Pro.
Sure enough, I’m typically left with very little charge by the end of the day when I’ve had to spend a decent amount of time outside, causing much higher battery use by the display.
Infinix claims of 100W are a bit eyebrow-raising too. According to my power meter the Note 40 Pro Plus reaches a max power draw of 94W, and spends about a second or so at that top level before dropping to 64-65W.
This is not what “100W charging” should be. Still, what we get does charge the phone very quickly. The phone reaches 100% within 30 minutes and stops drawing power, denoting a truly full battery, at 34 minutes.
Wireless charging is supported too, at 20W, and this is a feature of the step-down Infinix Note 40 Pro too. Unusually, a pad was included in my standard retail pack, which is a nice touch.
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Should you buy it?
You’ll appreciate the style and slick design
This phone excels at looking sharp for the money, and this extends to the feel thanks to the use of curved display glass and an equally curved rear.
You want the most versatile camera or major gaming power
This processor isn’t that great for gaming, and as there’s only one good camera on the back, with no ultra-wide, it’s a deceptively basic array.
Final Thoughts
The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus excels at looking expensive while not being expensive. It has a truly curved glass front, a good-looking OLED screen, convincing fake metal sides and, in my particular handset, a nicely judged combo of gold and green.
It’s faking it to make it, sure, but there’s enough charm to the look even after you see through it.
The turn-offs are all about the substance. The Infinix Note 40 Pro Plus’ processor is only sufficient, and lacks Vulkan support. The “Super Zoom” is all software, with no zoom camera on board. And the secondary cameras are rubbish too.
Infinix has made the phone cheap enough these cuts aren’t insulting. But unless you’re truly beguiled by the curvy front, the Samsung Galaxy A35, Nothing Phone (2a) or a cut-price deal on a Pixel 7a are more consistent all-round.
How we test
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry-standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as a main phone for over a week
Thorough camera testing in a variety of conditions
Tested and benchmarked using respected industry tests and real-world data
FAQs
It has very basic IP53 water resistance, suggesting it can handle rain but not submersion in water.
It supports wireless charging up to 20W.
It has a different processor and faster charging.
