InFocus Vision 3 Pro First Impressions: A capable budget smartphone with a confusing price tag

US-based technology company InFocus had ventured into the Indian smartphone market sometime back, but has not been able to properly gain a foothold in the country largely due to the dominance of Chinese smartphone makers. Since InFocus is largely a budget smartphone brand, the likes of Xiaomi’s Redmi series or Huawei’s successful Honor series become its immediate competition. [caption id=“attachment_4437953” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] InFocus Vision 3 Pro.[/caption] **InFocus**  today launched an update to its Vision 3 smartphone called the Vision 3 Pro. When we reviewed the previous phone from the company called the **InFocus Vision 3** we concluded that it was great value for money but only if you wanted a taller screen at budget pricing. However, back then Xiaomi wasn’t making smartphones with taller displays which is why the Vision 3 (priced at Rs 7,999) despite its under-powered internals made a bit of sense. The **Vision 3 Pro** has been launched at a price of Rs 10,999, which is Rs 4,000 more than the Vision 3. So how good is the Vision 3 Pro? Let’s take a closer look. Build And Design The phone has a sturdy look to it even though the entire body is made out of plastic. The rounded edges make the phone easy to hold and the plastic prevents the phone from slipping. The Vision 3 Pro comes with a fingerprint reader placed on the back of the device around the top half of the phone, above which we see a dual-camera unit along with a flash unit. At the top end, we have a 3.5 mm headphone jack and on the bottom end sits a micro-USB 2.0 port along with two grills (one for the mic and the other for the speaker). On the right side, there is a power button along with the volume rocker buttons. The left side has tray for access to the dual-SIM slot. [caption id=“attachment_4437955” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] InFocus Vision 3 Pro.[/caption] On the front, we see a 5.7-inch display with 18:9 full-screen aspect ratio, which has become a design norm for smartphone makers these days. There is no physical home button due to the tall screen with virtual navigation keys taking their place at the bottom of the display. Also visible on the front above the display is a 13 MP selfie camera and the earpiece. Considering that the phone is made out of plastic, I expected it be lighter but you can blame that 4,000 mAh battery for its heft. Display [caption id=“attachment_4437957” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] InFocus Vision 3 Pro.[/caption] The display of the phone seems to be quite good at first glance. The phone has an HD+ display so you cannot stream any 1080p content on the device, which is a bit of problem as both Xiaomi and Huawei offers FHD+ units on their budget offerings. Indoors, the screen did not seem bright enough during my short hands on time so my review will shed more details as to whether it fairs well outdoors in direct sunlight. However, I was impressed while viewing photos on the device as they appeared quite crisp. Chipset, RAM, Storage Inside the phone, there is an octa-core MediaTek MT6750 SoC with 8 Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.5 GHz. Besides that the phone offers a healthy 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage, which can be expanded using a micro-SD card. All in all, InFocus has merely upgraded the RAM and storage from its earlier Vision 3 smartphone. [caption id=“attachment_4437959” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] InFocus Vision 3 Pro.[/caption] OS and Software I was disappointed to see that the Vision 3 Pro is still running Android 7.0 Nougat. I had expected at least 7.1 if not Android 8.0 Oreo. On top of that, the phone has InFocus’ InLife UI that kills the app drawer and you have to swipe right on the home screen to go to the other apps. For the positives there’s no bloatware of any kind on the phone and the UI seemed pretty smooth. More details will be revealed in the full review of the device. [caption id=“attachment_4437961” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] InFocus Vision 3 Pro.[/caption] Camera Though the InFocus offers dual-camera setup at the back with 13 MP + 8 MP sensors they did not look all that impressive. Even when considering the price point I could quite clearly see noise in photos taken in brightly lit indoor and outdoor environments. In low light, the camera performance seemed more abysmal. The front camera with its 13 MP camera didn’t fair too good as well. Obviously, these are just my initial observations and the full review will reveal positives and the negatives of the camera is on the device. [caption id=“attachment_4437963” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] InFocus Vision 3 Pro.[/caption] Battery and Connectivity As was the case with the Vision 3, the Vision 3 Pro also comes with a massive 4,000 mAh battery. As far as connectivity options go the phone has a hybrid-SIM slot which means that the second SIM slot doubles as a micro-SD card reader. The phone also has 4G VoLTE capability, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, and GPS. [caption id=“attachment_4437973” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] InFocus Vision 3 Pro.[/caption] Conclusion After using the Vision 3 Pro for while, I can conclude that InFocus has worked on a few areas with minor improvements in build quality, design and the increased RAM. But even with these improvements in place it hard to warrant Rs 4,000 bump in the price tag. At Rs 10,999 the phone is in direct competition with the budget kingpin Redmi Note 5  and the  Honor 9 Lite , both of which come with some capable hardware and software (Honor 9 lite packs in Android Oreo). Keep your eyes glued to our website for the full review that will give out more in-depth details about what has changed with the InFocus Vision 3 Pro and whether those changes make sense when compared to the current smartphone offerings in the budget segment.