Infinix Note 60 Ultra Review

Design

• Aluminium frame
• Sleek looks
• Stereo speakers

Clad in a semi-rigid case out of the box, you’ll have to pry the Infinix Note 60 Ultra out of its plastic prison to gauge its good looks. Tall, dark, and handsome, this is a candybar-style device designed in partnership with Italian design house Pininfarina, with a few neat tricks on either side.

Though we only have eyes for the darker version right now, it’s also available in Italian-themed takes on red, blue, and silver.

The left sports a small multi-use button that performs similarly to Apple’s Action Button, letting you assign apps and actions to a tap or long press. On the other side, well… the flat sensor-type zone might as well be a mystery. It’s a health monitor, but there’s no mention of it in the setup. At least it has stereo speakers. And pretty good JBL-branded ones at that.

Designed around the impressive detail of a supercar, you only need to peek at the back to get an idea of what it’s going for – carbon fibre rear, a visor-style camera zone, hidden lighting accents, and a signature etched into its body. The idea of it being sculpted for “low-drag” is a hilarious thought. We’re not running like The Flash with this on full show, but sure, it’s a car thing.

Where the Dot-matrix display beside the cameras fits into the car theming isn’t clear, but it’s a neat feature that could have lived and died with the ASUS ROG Phone series a year or two back. And yes, you can play little games on it.

Continuing its cooler features, this is actually a two-way satellite phone. It’s not something we can test, but it’s certainly a unique selling point. Something we can test, though, is its handy IR blaster on the top. As someone with a vintage Mitsubishi CRT sucking up space, its remote being something from a far-flung future is oddly adorable.

Though ours arrived with a compact 100W charger, there’s no mention of it being included as standard with a purchase. What is mentioned is the MagCase (seen above), as well as two accessories we did not get: the ‘MagCharge Base’ and the ‘MagPad’, presumably two wireless charging peripherals to go with the aforementioned case.

Screen

• 144Hz AMOLED display
• Blindingly bright 4500nit peak outdoor brightness
• Ultra HDR support for photos/videos shot with the cameras

First impressions are important. With the Infinix Note 60 Ultra, they weren’t great. Not bad, but slightly below my expectation. Though a 6.8-inch 1.5k display is perfectly fine, its presentation lacks the pop of other handsets tested in this price range, despite using top-end AMOLED tech. It just wasn’t quite as vibrant as I’d expected, even when tweaking the display settings.

The Infinix does, however, gets blindingly bright, effortlessly ignoring the directly harsh rays of a British heatwave. High brightness is one boon of AMOLED tech, so that’s a win.

Its high peak brightness should afford it access to solid HDR content, but the support isn’t there. Ultra HDR is available for your photos, but that’s it – HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision? Forget it. Still, given that sort of stuff is still best seen on a bigger screen, it’s not a huge mark on its potential.

Though it can climb to 144Hz (another common benefit of AMOLED), this one can’t scale down beyond 60Hz. There’s no 1Hz mode for comfortable, battery-optimised reading, nor will it appease filmmakers and cinephiles with a more cinematic refresh rate. It’s 60, 120, 90, 144Hz, or off entirely. It being nerfed to 60Hz by default also played a big part in that less-than-glowing first impression.

144Hz is certainly a boon for gamers, but the polling rate doesn’t feel quite up to the task, with a few missed taps – especially on the lock screen – making the whole experience feel a little more janky than it ought to. That said, it’s still a bright, big, and clear display; for most, it’s absolutely fine.

Software and AI

• XOS fork of Android 16
• Loads of modern AI features (on or off-device)
• Fairly generous update pipeline promise

Based on Android 16, which means access to a wide range of Google apps, Infinix’s in-house XOS 16 skin brings a few extra goodies to the table. There is some social media bloat pre-installed, but not much on the e-commerce front. It’s mostly first-party Infinix utilities hogging what would otherwise be a clean dashboard.

Swipe right, though, and the Google News feed is anything but. You can toggle each alternative off with a few taps, but just seeing something like Taboola on by default is disappointing. Regardless of the design team behind it, this isn’t a budget device — ad bloat shouldn’t be this bad.

Reminiscent of gaming-focused handsets from Xiaomi’s Poco brand and a few others, there’s a Game Mode overlay that offers handy battery tweaks and performance metrics. It even doubles as a launcher, conveniently offering easy download buttons for popular mobile games like PUBG Mobile, Free Fire, and Mobile Legends: ageing esports classics that will fly on a handset like this. Are they technically ads? Absolutely. But they fit the market.

Dig into the settings, and you’ll find all manner of AI tools and workflows. Forget Google Assistant or Gemini, though – Infinix employs its own Folax assistant to hide beneath a 0.5-second press of the power button. There’s call assist tech and summaries, bi-directional translation, circle to search, real-time subtitles, and all that good stuff.

On the generative AI front, there’s AI rewriting functionality, the ability to turn images into live themes and wallpapers, and – where the Note part of the name is derived – a feature that interprets finger-drawn sketches, potentially turning your recreation of Picasso’s ‘Le Chien’ into a fox. All of this presumably runs on a far-flung server for processing, but a toggle at the bottom demands that it be handled on-device instead. That’ll save some water.

You also get three years of major OS updates and five years of security patches. That’s a little behind the best you’ll get for the price, but it’s not the worst either.

Camera

• 200MP main sensor
• 8MP ultrawide and a 50MP telephoto with 3.5x optical zoom
• 32MP selfie snapper

The Infinix Note 60 Ultra’s flashy rear design isn’t just for show. Around the back is a genuinely capable triple-camera setup, led by a new 200MP main sensor, backed by a 50MP 3.5x telephoto and an 8MP ultrawide. It’s a versatile package on paper, and one that mostly delivers in practice.

The main camera is the standout. Using Samsung’s large 1/1.4-inch ISOCELL HPE sensor, it’s a clear upgrade on the previous generation and much of the competition at around $750. In daylight, it captures detailed, punchy shots with strong contrast, reliable white balance and impressive dynamic range. Colours pop nicely without looking overcooked, and images come out looking polished straight away.

There’s a full-fat 200MP mode too, but it feels more like a spec-sheet boast than a feature you’ll use often. It’s slower, creates huge files and adds little meaningful extra detail. For most shots, the standard mode is the better option.

The 50MP telephoto is another strong point. At its native 3.5x zoom, it turns out crisp, contrasty images with pleasing colour and dependable white balance. Saturation can run a little hot, especially in blues, and detail in darker foliage isn’t always perfect, but it’s a solid and genuinely useful zoom lens.

Push beyond that native zoom and things get shakier. At 7x, softness and digital artefacts become much more noticeable, so you’ll want to stick close to 3.5x for the best results.

The 8MP ultrawide doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s better than the spec suggests. Detail is naturally limited, but colours are good, dynamic range is respectable, and autofocus gives it some extra flexibility for close-ups. It’s not brilliant, but it’s far from filler.

The 32MP selfie camera is better than expected too. It doesn’t fully justify its megapixel count, but it still produces sharp, flattering selfies with pleasing skin tones, solid colour and good dynamic range. It also holds up reasonably well in lower light, which isn’t always a given.

Performance

• Mediatek Dimensity 8400 Ultimate chipset
• Mali-G720 MC7 GPU
• 12GB RAM with UFS 4.0 storage

With the Mediatek Dimensity 8400 Ultimate chipset powering its whole operation, the Infinix Note 60 Ultra is a fighting force. Far from the most powerful handset in its price bracket, but a soldier that’s certainly up to the task.

Whether you’re gaming on the go with this generation’s boundary-pushing F2P adventures or simply looking for a handset that won’t grind to a halt when your next read is beset by ads, Mediatek’s ‘ultimate’ solution takes it on the chin.

To put all that into numbers, you can easily compare to other phones we’ve taken for a test drive. Here’s the skinny: the Infinit Note 60 Ultra scored 1298 and 6435 on the Geekbench 6 single and multi-core tests, respectively.

Is that a bit lower than what you can squeeze out of Mediatek’s 9500s chipset found in a considerably cheaper phone from Poco? It is. Do you get a 200MP Samsung snapper on the gaming-focused Xiaomi spin-off? You do not. Does it still power through Neverness to Everness on max settings? Yep. Sacrifices have to be made, and designers need to be paid, but Infinix has struck a nice balance here.

The point is, mobile chipsets are crushing it at every price point. We can’t push them any harder. But if you do want that extra headroom for the next big mobile game, this might not be the most sound investment.

Battery

Sporting a 7000mAh battery, this isn’t quite as big as the monstrous 8000mAh cell in the Poco X8 Pro Max, but with the same 100W charging ceiling, it’s pretty close. You don’t have to do any math to figure out that it charges to full faster, but won’t last quite as long on a full battery. Unless you’re the sort to hammer it with console-level games or crank the brightness to read a full novel out under the summer sun, this is easily a multi-day device.

Taking well over 24 hours to passively empty from 15%, a 15-minute charge means at least two days of standby time with the supplied 100W charger.

Hooked up, expect to satiate this one in well under an hour. And with 50W wireless charging support, it’s happy to sip refreshing electricity at a slightly slower rate if you have a charging solution that’s kind to its gargantuan camera setup.

Better yet, the included case uses a magnet system, making it compatible with MagSafe solutions like the Apple MagSafe Battery Pack and my trusty Anker 3-in-1 MagSafe cube.

Should you buy it?