Infinix Note 60 Ultra review: its finest camera phone yet?

The Infinix Note 60 Ultra is a step up for the mobile phone risk-taker. Collaborating with Italian car-design experts Pininfarina, the Note 60 Ultra is both sleek and cool, but behind the upmarket flair is a phone that outperforms many rivals, although the price of this flagship also sees an upward motion for a brand that has specialised in budget bargains so far...

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The Infinix Note 60 Ultra continues the risk-taking mobile maker's track record for turning the often-boring and homogenous world of smartphones into something interesting and exciting.

This time, the Hong Kong-based, Shenzhen-headquartered, Nigerian-designed product adds yet more international flavour to the mix, as here we have a collaboration with Italian design firm Pininfarina. But will this concoction add up to a good camera phone? And has the uptick in the price column diluted Infinix's famous value proposition in the market? Let's find out.

(Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson)

Key specs

Swipe to scroll horizontally Specs as tested Chipset: Mediatek Dimensity 8400 Ultimate Memory: 12GB RAM OS: XOS 16, based on Android 16 Screen: 6.78in AMOLED front display Active Matrix rear display Resolution: 1208 x 2644 (429ppi) Refresh rate: 144Hz Storage: 256GB/512GB Rear cameras: 200MP 23mm wide,

50MP 80mm periscope telephoto

8MP ultrawide Front camera: 32MP wide Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, NFC, Infrared, GPS, FM Radio, USB Type-C 2.0 Battery: 7000mAh Dimensions: 162.3 x 77.2 x 7.9mm Weight: 220g

Design, build & display

(Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson)

Now, the car nerds among you will immediately link this name with cars, especially those fast, red ones from Italy. Infinix, thankfully, does nothing to hide or dispel that association, with the Pininfarina logo emblazoned on the side of the handset, an Alcantara-patterned back cover, the Ferrari red prevalent throughout the default OS interface once switched on, and the included wireless charging pad, which is shaped like a racecar. My inner 10-year-old loves it.

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As if to ram the point home, the colour options for the handset are similarly Italy-themed: Torino Black (the one I received for testing), Monza Red, Roma Silver and Amalfi Blue.

The power button has a little red accent line through the middle, and on the front is your standard Ultra-sized 6.78-inch black mirror (with a snazzy 429ppi screen, mind). The overall finish is good-quality, if a little light on grippiness, and the weight is considerable by modern standards, as you might expect for an Ultra handset, at 220 grams.

However, the bulk of my attention was quickly focused on the back. It sports a large, racecar-windscreen-shaped camera notch that has more than just the trio of wide, ultrawide and periscope telephoto lenses; an Active Matrix Display right next to it.

So, what does that display actually do? Well, if you want usefulness, I guess it shows you the time, and also it flashes (along with a red light stripe underneath the camera notch) when you have a message or call notification.

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But much more importantly, it features a pixellated little animal that wags its tail at you in between notifications, and it also features two games through 'Matrix MiniPlay'. One is Dot Dash, where your adorable critter has to jump over obstacles (you push the multifunction button to jump), and the other is Star Blast, which is, erm, inspired by Asteroids. You control your little flying machine by simply tilting your phone left or right as you play.

Is it useless? Absolutely.

Do I love it? You bet.

Features and camera

(Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson)

As is to be expected in 2026, this thing is decked out with AI features. The biggest one of those is Folax, an on-board AI hub that offers functions such as MindHub, which helps in summarising documents, extracting key points from docs, sites and videos and adapt to your usage habits over time, Shoot for Answers, which helps you understand and handle difficult questions to help with your learning, Scan-to-Doc, which uses the camera to create digital documents, and an English Coach, a language-training model that helps non-native speakers improve their English.

Then there's a one-tap multifunction button on the side that, when you click it, brings out a menu of your most-used apps and functions for quick access (especially useful for the idiot writing this review, who never remembers to create or put apps in easily navigable subfolders).

You can also personalise and customise the menus and overall aesthetics of the operating system to within an inch of its life, with hundreds of themes and system fonts available, should you want to make your phone completely illegible and un-navigable by anyone but you.

Then there's the camera.

Image 1 of 5 Instagramming your food is still a Thing, and it works well here. (Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson) This image was taken in near-total darkness, and shows the quality of the collab between the lens, sensor and the Super Night AI upscaling. (Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson) Flower and nature shots look nice, if unspectacular. There's no Macro function, but the Wide camera does a good job. (Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson) Portraits are crisp and detailed. Most of the processing looks natural and does a good job of highlighting faces and detail. (Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson) Street Snap introduces a touch of vignette and a deep, soft focus. I like it. (Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson)

The camera, like most smartphone cameras today, features a considerable amount of automatic AI upscaling and 'prettification' features, partly because we, as a species, want all the bells and whistles all the time now, and partly to cover up the considerable pixel-binning that goes into the 200-megapixel spec claim (note: 200MP claims, across the industry, almost never offer truly native, raw image resolution of that quality)

The result is images that look real nice for anyone who wants a nice, casual image and video-capture device. It's good for social media in particular, with a plethora of filters, camera modes such as Portrait, Street Snap, Super Night, and even AI makeup functions, some of which are more realistic than others.

It's not going to bother pro-level smartphone cameras like the Leica system in Xiaomi and top-end Poco devices, the ambitious Samsung cameras, or iPhone's famous film-ready video capture quality, but for anyone else, I see this as a feature-rich camera and editing suite that's great for social media content and casual photo and video capture.

Performance

Swipe to scroll horizontally Infinix Note 60 Ultra benchmark scoring Header Cell - Column 0 Header Cell - Column 1 Infinix Note 60 Ultra Motorola Edge 70 Google Pixel 9 Pro GEEKBENCH 6 CPU Single-core: 1414 1338 1885 Row 1 - Cell 0 CPU Multi-core: 6401 4164 4387 Row 2 - Cell 0 GPU OpenCL: 12,027 4816 6903

With the Mediatek Dimensity 8400 Ultimate chipset onboard, 12 GB of RAM (plus some clever RAM-boosting gymnastics using the available storage), the Note 60 Ultra is definitely the most powerful and smoothest-running Infinix I've had so far. It doesn't buckle under load, I could start up and run an unholy amount of apps on it before any noticeable lagging started creeping in.

With a 144Hz screen, it's also gaming-ready, and I found gaming both sharp and responsive in my testing. Addictive but resource-heavy racing game and infamous phone killer CSR 2 works fine, with the interactive car features fully functional, and few-to-no glitches in the drag-racing action. If a Pininfarina-designed phone had failed this test, to be fair, it would have been embarrassing.

The battery is a staggering 7,000 mAh, and I eked out almost 18 hours of battery life from it in my active-use testing, with a combination of calls, browsing, video watching, camera use and gaming. That's almost 6 hours more than the Samsung Galaxy S25 FE gives you, and trails pretty much only the Pro Max models of the latest iPhone, Samsung, Xiaomi and Poco handsets.

Price

(Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson)

And now for the (slightly) deflating news. As Infinix has made it their expertise to vastly undercut rivals on price in recent years, it may have left me a little spoiled in my expectations here. The Note 60 Ultra comes in at approximately £699 in the UK and $650 in the US at the time of writing. It's quite a bit more than most Infinix models have cost to date, and is closer to flagship pricing than before.

That said, it's a hell of a lot less than Ultra-sized flagships from the big brands, and this phone has most of what you'll find there, including performance, screen quality, camera (for the most part) and build quality, with a battery that actually beats many of their more heralded rivals.

Buy it if:

You want near-flagship performance for a (high) midrange price

You like gimmicky back screens (I mean, I do)

You want great battery life and a good hobby camera

(Image credit: Future / Erlingur Einarsson)

Don't buy it if: