Of late, US based InFocus has become quite aggressive in India and they have been launching entry level to mid-range smartphones at regular interval. The hallmark of InFocus smartphones are their appealing designs. Their phones do not give the appearance of cheap plastic or metal but are quite impressive and give the feeling of premium devices. InFocus has taken their design philosophy forward in the recently introduced M680 smartphone and besides good design, this device comes with powerful hardware features also. We have used this device for three days and are quite impressed with its performance.
Design
We got white and rose gold coloured M680 for review, which is quite handsome combination and give very smart look to the device. It is also available in silver color. This phone is constructed of very good quality of plastic and its back cover looks metallic but it is not and the company has used metal on the side frames on which sits all buttons and SIM tray. This phone has rounded corners and bear reflection of iPhone 6 Plus in the looks and the faint resemblance ends here only. The logo of InFocus is engraved on the back cover which looks impressive and the logo has also been given on top of the front near the front snapper.
The volume buttons have been provided on the left side and power button and SIM tray is on the right side, and are made of good quality metal. The phone has Hybrid SIM slots ( you can insert two Nano SIM or a microSD card and one Nano SIM).The 3.5 mm audio jack is placed at the top along with secondary noise cancellation mic. At the bottom, the micro USB port is at the bottom along with a mono speaker grill and primary microphone.
This phone has thickness of 7.2 mm and its weight is 158 gms but keeping its screen size of 5.5 inch, it looks a little bit bulky and difficult to operate with one hand.
Display
the InFocus M680 comes with 5.5 inch Full HD display with resolution of 1080×1920 pixels and having pixel density of 401 PPI. The display is quite bright and reproduces vibrant colors and has good viewing angles. You will enjoy watching movies, Youtube videos and reading text on this display. The only issue observed by us that reading and viewing in the sunlight is not as legible as it should have been. But the saving grace is that this is low-priced phone and you can’t expect it to deliver 100 percent on this aspect. Moreover, even display of flagship devices struggle in sunlight. So, this shortcoming can be ignored quite easily.
The other minor hiccup faced by us was its touch button below the display. First of all, they do not lit up and sometimes, we have to press it again and again to get them worked. The accuracy is an issue, which could be due to some software glitch or the review unit has been used quite badly by the previous users.
Camera
We are quite impressed with both the cameras of M680. This is the only smartphone which comes with 13MP rear as well as 13MP front snapper. The rear camera is placed on the left side of the back with LED flash. Both front and rear camera comes with F2.2 aperture and Samsung 3M2 sensor. The rear camera comes with different modes such as Normal, Motion Track, Live Photo and Panorama. The front snapper also has Normal as well as Face beauty mode for clicking good selfies and selife clickers will love this feature. The quality of the pictures clicked with the rear camera in daylight turns out quite good with sharp results. We reproduce below few images clicked in daylight in normal mode.
The quality of the images in the night is also reproduced below which are also ok:
Performance
InFocus M680 is driven by a 64 bit 1.5 GHz Octa-Core processor ( MTK MT6753 chipset) combined with 2GB DDR3 RAM and 16 GB internal memory (expandable upto 64 GB via microSD card). This phone offers connectivity options of 4G, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM etc.
While using this phone for more than 72 hours, we did not face any stutter and the switching between the apps is quite smooth. We streamed few videos from Youtube on our Wi-Fi connection and browsed various websites, social network channels like Facebook and Twitter and switched between them quite frequently to see the performance and this went without any lag. We also played game of Asphalt 8 on this phone and our experience was good. No hiccup noticed. But we find that if you use the device quite heavily for gaming, video viewing, for social networking continuously then it heats up a little. But in our view, this is also normal phenomenon as even flagship devices like Samsung’s Galaxy S6, which I am using, suffer from this problem.
Moreover, audio voice calling quality on this phone is good and we did not face any problem in receiving signals in any corner. We could not test the phone in basement due to paucity of time as we had to return the device in very tight frame-work.
Battery
The M680 is packed with 2600 mAh battery, which we feel is little let-down as full HD display of 5.5 inches require more powerful battery. In our opinion, the battery should have been minimum of 3000mAh capacity, but still with moderate usuage, the battery lasts for 8 to 10 hours.
Software
This phone runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with its own InLife UI and fortunately does not come with any bloatware. Its software is quit easy to handle and user friendly. It does have some third party apps such as Dropbox and WPS Office but these can be easily uninstalled. What we liked the most is Power Detective app, which gives very good inforamtion about the usuage of battery, its level, and its temperrature as well as of CPU temperature.
Conclusion
After reading this, one would ask whether one should consider it if he or she has to spend Rs. 10,000 odd Rupees. If you do not bother much about brand ( InFocus is a new brand for Indian market) and are looking for good front and rear snappers, trouble free performance with 5.5 inch display and do not care much about battery as power charger has become quite a norm to carry, then you can certainly give InFocus 680 a serious look. The M680 is well-designed phone with good hardware features and excellent cameras and the icing on the cake is that it looks good in your hands. If you have penchant for phalet then you can certainly go for it and its color combination of white and rose gold will add zing to your decision to buy it.
InFocus M680 is priced Rs. 10,999 and goes on sale today exclsuviely on Snapdeal.
